I absolutely hate using VMs over VPNs, any slight interruption in my fragile home Wi-Fi (or whatever the hell the VPN is doing) causes my whole dev environment to freeze.
I had Ethernet installed in all rooms at home. For some 800 euros (5 Ethernet outlets including the router) you get sub millisecond latencies to your router and your computer works wonders again.
Installing an Ethernet LAN network is the best investment for anyone who works from home.
Wi-fi really sucks in urban areas and soon even in rural areas because of the IoT crap.
That's not really true in noisy areas. The available radio spectrum is limited, and as more users inhabit an area you are basically time-sharing. The less time you have to send packets, the more latency some of those packets will experience. Empirically, wifi latency can be _extremely_ poor in busy areas.
How do you know you could have done it for 2/3 of the price? All my internal walls are solid brick, so running a cable from one end to the other would involve drilling through at least one, but likely 3 brick walls, and either channeling through the wall or pulling up the hardwood floors above them. No way are you going to install 5 points for €500 in a job like that.
Also Ethernet is definitely useful for latency. Having sub 1ms latency on a wifi network is very very difficult, and definitely not going to happen with 5 routers.
I did development on a VM for 4 years because the corporate policy was to issue everyone the same spec machine. An i5 with 8GB of RAM and 120GB SSD is a lot more pain than a VM.
I work on a lot of systems with public and private facing endpoints and so I have a remote session running on a machine outside our network as well.
It's a security/usability trade off for me.