I don't know if it's appropriate for your case, but devcontainer <https://devcontainer.community/awesome>, code-server, or Eclipse Theia are basically VSCode over http and will mimick the GitHub.dev experience. I'm guessing a lot of your heartburn was trying to get the graphical parts of Electron to operate inside docker but it's really not good at that

I did see the VSCode part, but it might interest you that the JetBrains products also have an rpc style development setup through Gateway, where the product runs effectively headless in the container and just sends the display commands to your local IDE to handle latency sensitive GUI operations

You need to share the wayland socket (how programs talk to the compositor) with the container in docker. I’ve seen a script that does that on GitHub but I can’t remember the name. Distrobox and Toolbx also does this, but they also share your home directory with the container because that’s where all your config are.

Are you using devcontainers? The vscode UI doesn’t run in docker, but a remote server does.