The core functionality being available everywhere means a familiar and efficient, even if not ideal and complete, suite is available everywhere else: servers, other computers, a new system. For transient / temporary use. Like on a business trip, a flight, or the conference.
Just like you wouldn't use a random laptop during a business trip and expect to be efficient, you'd bring your own!
It does sound to me like that is not a consequence of the GUI-ness of VSCode, but just the man-hours that go into making it. In other words, it doesn't sound like that experience can't be replicated in terminal-only editors.
If anyone has experience with remote editing in a terminal editor, but not through an ssh shell (ie, the traditional way), I'm very interested in hearing your experience.
As usual, emacs has a mode for everything:
The mostly-single-threaded nature of Emacs gets in the way sometimes.