His comment was more that the juniors that he mentors break their environments.
The junior breaking their environment is usually self inflicted.
Besides to fix this, you still don't need to run everything remotely.
[Edit]
In my experience, the biggest slowdown to being productive is corporate lockdown of laptops, but then no support from corporate for getting a development environment set up. So the first 2 weeks on the job is waiting for local admin permissions so that you can install brew and make your Mac environment as close to Linux as possible.
more like because the language is a non obvious clusterfuck that requires self-inflicted pain to be productive in. sounds like a good use case for a remote container
not to mention, pair programming/ merge review will be easier, making guiding juniors more efficient. of course i'm not saying it'll be all positive but there are legitimate reasons gitlab is doing this
If we were allowed to use a real OS, you could just run local containers. Or hell, this was solved with Vagrant how many years ago?
Why does it have to be remote?
The whole point is that I don't always have internet access, sometimes there are outages and sometimes it's just plain slow for some reason. It's shit enough all the video calls I have to be involved in these days, not as bad as all the face the face meetings in crampt rooms with everyone falling asleep because of the lack of air circulation. Why do you want to make the development environment crappier?
It also isn't clear how it would make code reviews better, or even paired programming? Shared workspaces are already a thing.
The junior breaking their environment is usually self inflicted. Besides to fix this, you still don't need to run everything remotely.
[Edit] In my experience, the biggest slowdown to being productive is corporate lockdown of laptops, but then no support from corporate for getting a development environment set up. So the first 2 weeks on the job is waiting for local admin permissions so that you can install brew and make your Mac environment as close to Linux as possible.