[FpUser]

"...work on things without needing to spin up an entire environment on your computer"

For me "spinning up the entire environment" comes to clicking the icon of whatever IDE I decide to run for whatever task I am about to do. Is it such a big trouble?

I understand that it has good value for teaching to the point until students have to accomplish something more serious then some glorified "Hello World".

As for access from anywhere - I can access my development workstations remotely from anywhere with no problems (thanks to NoMAchine ond/or RDP) but since I also lug my super duper laptop anywhere I rarely need to enable this kind of access.

But then again I am a cloud luddite. I own all my computing/development resources (well I rent some remote dedicated servers for backup/standby purposes). Other people have different attitude which is fine. I just hate the idea of my stuff residing/being controlled by any other entity but myself.

[Stratoscope]

I have all of my favorite IDEs ready to run on a click - a few JetBrains ones, VS Code and Visual Studio, etc.

I still use Repl.it if I want to try out something in a hurry, or especially if I want to post a code sample for one of my Stack Overflow answers.

Both of these options are great! It's not one vs. another.

[FpUser]

>"It's not one vs. another."

I do not perceive those as mutually exclusive. Both are good but for a different things. It does seem to me however that anything not cloud/web based is becoming anathema in some circles.