As someone that is old enough to have used UNIX development servers for the whole company, with PC thin clients, reading about remote development as modern workflow is kind of hilarious.
No, they aren't anything better than what I am used to.
Also, as compromise, a cloud shell, browser based IDE setup, and dev containers, also does the job in what concerns cloud deployments, which should be driven from CI/CD and don't have shells on containers anyway.
Remote VSCode is far better than any of those options. If you don't want to try it that's fine, but don't pretend you know better.
The ultimate deal breaker, however, is X11 not being proxied by corporate firewalls, even though the protocol is extensively documented and the source is available. But that is because RDP has won over, and demand for X11 has diminished.
But, yes, X11 prefers local networks with flat topologies, and the protocol is chatty (again, not as big of an issue anymore unless run over a mobile connection with a high latency, but the X11 protocol compression helps with that).
vscode's remote services is far beyond your old remote experience, an experience I share