More generally, targeting another project's complete featureset is often a great way to get mired down in the wrong details. Unless you can afford to do a proper cleanroom -- then, you'll be able to at least match the performance and useful abstractions used in the original.
Remote SSH + Dev Containers and their seamless integration (even stacking one on the other) are the only features that keep me using VS Code. I would love to see the full implementation of these in an editor as fast and light weight as Zed.
Fwiw, I do a lot of infrastructure-as-code, full stack, and systems programming.
I usually have a split screen (editor | terminal) or two terminals on the side, and exec into a container, or use devenv.sh.
If I _really_ need to modify files in the container as I dev and a "make" doesn't cut it, I usually just run podman with a -v mount. Similarly for remote machines w/ sshfs, though I try not to.
Similarly, editing code in-place over SSH rather than rsyncing back and forwards is very useful for certain types of embedded development. I worked for a while on sensor systems where a lot of the logic was handled by a Python webserver that couldn't really run without access to the sensor data it was using. Developing entirely locally was therefore difficult, but developing on the machine was also painful because it didn't have the right tools. So we'd work locally, and then copy the Python files over every so often and restart the server. At the time, I don't think VSCode's remote stuff was working as well, but I believe now it's a lot better and could have handled that situation well - edit everything in-place, run it immediately, but still have the power of you local development machine available to you.
Wha...? This is a killer feature. I'll put up with a lot of crap to use it. That doesn't mean I wouldn't switch to something nicer in other ways if it also offered this killer feature.
It's hard for me to understand why there are IDEs under active development not trying to offer this feature. It is so much better an experience to have the network split into the proper place: between the UI and the heavy computation. Having the UI too far away undoes whatever responsiveness work has been done and more. Having the heavy computation too near means it's hard to develop and test the far environment, take advantage of its compute, etc.
almost all my coding these days is over vsc-ssh. if zed supported sshing into a remote host and into a docker container as seamlessly as I can in vscode, Id switch immediately. The performance of the ui in zed is so much better. I'm a bit sad I can't switch with its current feature set.