The alternative is suggested by tramp, which from what I know treats the remote as a network filesystem instead of an execution host. I don't believe that tramp deploys any binaries: it reads and writes bytes over pipes and all meaningful execution happens locally. Notably, it does not achieve persistence, because there's a difference between "VSCode plugins have access while you're SSH'd in" and "VSCode plugins have access forever".
When you’re in a buffer displaying a remote file, most commands take that in account and execute in the remote context. And more often than not, that means connecting through pipes (and files) inside the ssh tunnels. Eglot (with gopls) works fine and fast for me. Executing ‘shell’ opens a remote shell, as well as launching tasks through compilation mode. Grepping and finding files, as well as dired also work fine.
Persistence is important to me, and making it read-only significantly reduces its usefulness. I regularly SSH into a dev machine to run scripts and update configurations. As long as a tool lets me do that without getting in my way, I'm good with any solution that works.
Tramp is perfectly able to write, it's just that it does it by writing a temp file locally and then using ssh to transfer the file to the remote, rather than installing a copy of itself on the remote and acting through that. It only uses executables that it finds on the remote. So if make and gcc and sed and such are available it's basically transparent, indistinguishable from local editing except for network round trips, and the only changes it leaves behind are the files you edit.
Then tramp would be a perfect fit for you as long as you’re willing to learn emacs. If you open a remote file, almost all actions when that buffer is selected will execute in the remote context (launching commands, visiting directories, opening a shell,…)
You don't know what you're missing then and I'm not sure such opinions count. It's probably for the best to refrain from criticizing things one has no experience in.
Not wanting to pick up a tool isn't criticism. I just said that I couldn't care less. It's an editor. I work mostly with VSCode and a sometimes with Goland or Intellij and don't think about them too often. Editor wars are lame and old; so are linter and formatting wars.
