Sad that it's necessary, but it's still a shitty environment. That employers foist it on their employees doesn't make it better.
>I also wonder how they didn't come across X Forwarding at all?
Xforwarding over VPN+residential broadband sounds like a great way to ...not use any sort of gui app.
During COVID I had the wonderful opportunity to remote into a work computer that had a Matlab license and watch the screen slowly paint in. Each keystroke took multiple seconds to display for me.
Love the ability to just forward one or several applications directly instead of the whole desktop environment. Ability to resume connections are also a godsend.
Seems like that usecase isn't given a lot of effort nowadays.
But this is an "XY problem" situation: what you want to get a GUI app running on a remote system to have its window display on the screen in front of you. Xvnc can accomplish that.
I agree that X forwarding is a terrible way for GUI apps, but the OP read like they were just looking at logs or plots/visualizations without much interactivity. X forwarding is good enough for that (At least good enough to give it a try over scping files back and forth)