Every time you save your edits Tramp makes a new connection to the remote server, it's slow(1sec vs 1ms) and becomes annoying waiting for the save all the time. For doing quick edits it doesn't matter but for doing dev all day it does.

When your dev environment is on a remote server, the DX of vscode is superior, everything just works(like all your plugins), it's seamless and fast.

Tramp is great for editing some remote files here and there, but to match vscode you will have to put a lot of effort to make everything feel equally fast and make all your packages work. Even then it won't feel as seamless as vscode because it "cheats" by installing a remote component, and I don't find that to be a valid complaint since you are already installing your whole dev environment in the remote server.

Having said that (I'm not a vscode user), what I always do is use Emacs on the remote server inside tmux. For me that's better and superior to the vscode remote plugin, my dev environment is local to my editor.

If you're working on very slow network connections, or the network just dies entirely, it's not uncommon for Emacs just to hang entirely. You then have to kill Emacs from another terminal. At the time I was running exwm (an Emacs window manager), which made the whole thing even more painful. Emacs is powerful, but polish is not its strong point.

That said, this was a few years ago now. Things may have improved in 26.1 when threads were introduced, and async got even easier.

> How?

Microsoft has done a lot better job promoting VSCode than GNU has promoting Emacs for the past few years. More mindshare among influential developers / evangelists has lead to massive increases in adoption which leads to better extensions which in turn fuels more adoption.

It probably doesn't hurt that VSCode uses the MIT license.