It was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Certainly not as fast as local, but extremely usable when not trying to do graphics-centric things. (Even using Eclipse was viable.)

Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mine in 2019, it's still probably usable.