RDP essentially takes video of your machine and transfers it over the internet. Same with keyboard and mouse interactions. Which has 3 main flaws:

1) If your internet connection isn't great, the responsiveness is terrible.

2) If you're using a slow machine as a guest, it can choke on the video feed

3) If you're using a metered bandwidth connection (sometimes I have to tether off my phone, which gets 5gb of data a month) you can quickly chew through your data. One time I capped out my data for the month just trying to do this for a couple hours.

On the other hand, VSCode is electron based, which means the entire UI can just be loaded into the browser. Then the only interactions passed across the net is low bandwidth text. Much more responsive because the keyboard/mouse responses are local, much less bandwidth intensive.

I already enjoy this using VSCode with SSH Remote to remote environments, and I had given up on my chromebook since other cloud IDEs have left me wanting. VS Online might bring my chromebook back into rotation again.