For a fair comparison, what about comparing against the cheapest "power cloud server"?
I mean Hetzner has a reputation for renting bare metal servers at the cheapest price in the market. Try AX102 which has very close performance to a M3 Max (CPU only): https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
While the OP's solution has a lot of advantages like being able to own the device and including GPU, but at least we do have cloud servers with comparable costs available.
I tried a lot to use remote servers for development when I had an Intel MacBook and I found the experience to always be so frustrating that I upgraded to the M series. Have the tools gotten any better or is vscode remote containers still the standard?
I did use them several years ago, for Clojure and ClojureScript development. Docker and docker-compose were my main tools, with syncthing helping synchronize source code in real time, Emacs as the editor. Everything worked quite well, but was never as easy and smooth as just running everything locally.
vscode remote containers are still the standard, but I find them very usable nowadays. My setup is a MBP M2 that I use to remote into a Windows WSL setup at home, a Linux desktop at work, and various servers. Nesting remote SSH + remote Docker works seamlessly, that was previously a major headache.
I mean Hetzner has a reputation for renting bare metal servers at the cheapest price in the market. Try AX102 which has very close performance to a M3 Max (CPU only): https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
While the OP's solution has a lot of advantages like being able to own the device and including GPU, but at least we do have cloud servers with comparable costs available.