Or how about just having a workstation at work? E.g. the Dell XPS 15 is a very popular laptop, but an equivalent cost workstation is around 8x faster for sustained well-parallelizable loads. Use a KVM switch with your work monitor, or use it as a headless server, do whatever. Want to work on machine learning stuff? Throw in an RTX 2080 Ti, off you go, never worry about cloud costs. Are you I/O bound? RAID0 off a couple NVMe drives.
It's immensely flexible and I'm surprised it's not more common.
It's more cost upfront, which is often a show-stopper. "Why can't you spin a beefy instance on EC2 when you need it for these 2-3 hours of intense work? It's so much cheaper!"
Also, a cloud VM, if it breaks, is replaced "for free" and "instantly"; fixing a physical machine has a cost and is a delay. Unless you're big enough to keep a spare (probably makes sense for many dozens of machines), it also looks a bit uneconomical from the business's POV.
Never mind that your cloud costs in a year end up being comparable to said workstation.
That was my experience at previous employers, but not my current one. We have some shared test environments in the cloud, but individualized test environments are discouraged. They're in the process of rolling out more powerful workstation laptops to provide us with enough horsepower to do testing locally.
That's why I'm tempted to build a custom workstation at home: so that I always have access to the compute resources I need to do my job.
A lot of usecases involve running a replication of the server environment locally in resource intensive containers