I'm confused with claiming obscure emacs or vi commands for TRAMP, I'm from the emacs side and as soon as I understood the file path scheme (e.g.: /ssh:$host:/path/to/file) I didn't have to do anything beyond that.

I would say that the dev client/server setup you're describing and what TRAMP provides are different things overall as well. TRAMP really just provides a way to get a file from a remote, edit it locally, and on save write it back to the remote system. I would not consider it a valid use case for remote dev especially now with how prevalent things like LSP's are and I don't know of a major mode that is designed around a remote LSP I'd just do X forwarding or some other screen share at that point. I would agree that overall it's a gap for emacs that VS Code does better.