OTOH, you could log off from one terminal and go to any other terminal (maybe in a different country) and continue to work right where you left.
If the environment is designed for that, it's not only doable, but practical.
I could see a use case where people don't want / can spend to much money on hardware. But even then, hardware is still required and I can't see where a subscription would help here.
I can work in my office at my workstation. I can walk out to the kitchen and sit down with my laptop and open the lid and be _exactly_ where I just was. I can move across the country and work from my laptop, a friend’s computer, a library, or anything else I run across along the way. My house can burn down and I can go to an electronics store and buy a new laptop and continue typing in the middle of the line where I left off when the smoke detector started beeping and I ran out of the house.
Separating the device I’m using from the work I’m doing makes the friction to move between devices near zero or zero.
Most of my work _is_ done from my desktop. The bulk of the remainder is done from my laptop. For that alone I find enough advantage to keep doing it. Zero context lost bouncing around.
But when I _was_ moving across the country, it was certainly nice not having my ability to earn an income any given day tied to a single device. When I was effectively homeless in my month-long move and staying with family at one point I did end up using their computer a couple times. You'll just have to take my word for it that they were okay with it.
Yes, if I'm somewhere without internet I can't get a lot done. But that's true whether I'm running programs locally or remotely.
Based on the number of people that show up on HN every time GitHub/GitLab/etc go down, I don't think I have any unusual dependencies that nobody else does.
Why not Chromebooks + web apps if you need some client-side hardware anyway?
Some companies are married to Microsoft Office, Exchange, and ShamePoint.