My newest yocto image mounts a 640K RO tmpfs on top of $HOME/.vscode-server to prevent people using VSCode from shitting all over the relatively small emmc.
(I'm a vimmer anyway... And emacs is too bloated to fit too, conveniently.)
If you connect via ssh, you could use Tramp. It does not install emacs on the target, but instead use a somewhat permanent connection as a tunnel for most emacs commands (transparently). Works too with docker, podman, distrobox, etc,...