Okay, but if you can define/script your environment enough to run in a pod, couldn't you just run that locally? You already have to solve the manual steps either way...
It’s a construct of the order of operations.
One core issue with local is the variety of OS’ and local build tools that would fundamentally mess with the centralized scripts. Getting company-wide setup scripts to work on top of existing laptop config was a continuous challenge. Hence, having a consistent baseline (OS flavor, system-level packages) on top of which the company-wide “setup script” is added followed by “developer-customizations” seems to work great.
Central teams can manage the first couple of steps and individual user-specific configuration can be managed much better in a decentralized manner.
It's easier to apply best practices to a greenfield project written in a modern language (hence devpods) than trying to comb through a decade+ of tech debt written in bash.