I fail to see how this is any better than IntelliJ/PyCharms remote interpreter feature and Services tab and a proper docker-compose file. It feels like VSCode is finally catching up.
Unfortunately no, the remote development feature is not what I mentioned or alluded to at all. Remote interpreters and docker services were supported even before 2019 in JetBrains IDEs which easily covers the articles use case.
This came out in 2019: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/3bafb9f610bd6b...