Take the following example, to save maybe 20-30$/month. You make engineers' life miserable while paying the same amount but in hourly rate...
When you run VSCode with bunch of Java plugins (where each uses Java), good luck reliably debugging anything. Me and basically anyone in my team would get into situation that the DevDesktop could not handle it anymore and would be stuck, requiring manual/hard restart or wait until load-avg dropping from 100+. I did the simplest trick, kept the m5.large DevDesktop, but manually added another Apollo ASG, attached the HostClass to a random Production fleet that already has thousands of hosts (still under/in my VP org). Happily lived with m5zn.4xlarge until I left. I am pretty sure the machine is still there and running... (As my access was cut off right away...)