Those laptop provisioning experiences sound great. I too found myself working from & deploying software to AWS Workspaces - cloud VDI seems like a great solution for a lot of businesses.

My remote work journey started with IBM in 2015. A few team members got Macs while the rest were issued beefy ThinkPads. It was one of the first large organizations I've seen that intentionally chose not to use Active Directory for their PC fleets. Unsurprisingly, IBM had IT service centers globally distributed. Despite the wider availability of service centers, I also installed extra storage and RAM myself on that ThinkPad.

It's great that remote work has taken off especially since Covid-19.