> Modern IDEs tend to support SSHing out to remote hosts to perform builds there, so as long as you're ok with source code being visible on laptops you can at least shift the "I need a workstation with a bunch of CPU" problem out to the cloud.

I'd mention SSH port forwarding in this section. For webdev you'll want to run your server on the remote host and use the local web browser. SSH port forwarding works great for this. I recently used this setup to get some extra RAM for a short project that could only be run as a collection of memory hungry microservices. This way I could get the whole thing running on one box; I spun down the server once the project was done.