Perhaps the problem isn't your particular environment, but these languages infrastructure.
I literally have not had Python just break on me, and after decades of software development at various places using Python/Java/Javascript I would say it is rare these days to see it happen to other people in the team either.
It usually happens when someone decides to experiment with a different way of handing application versioning that they saw on HN, but they aren't actually experienced enough to test it in a sandboxed environment. Essentially breaking their computer in a new way that no one else on the team can help, and that Google won't give you any help with.
I would say that the person you are replying to is probably inexperienced and doesn't want to learn their tools.
The junior breaking their environment is usually self inflicted. Besides to fix this, you still don't need to run everything remotely.
[Edit] In my experience, the biggest slowdown to being productive is corporate lockdown of laptops, but then no support from corporate for getting a development environment set up. So the first 2 weeks on the job is waiting for local admin permissions so that you can install brew and make your Mac environment as close to Linux as possible.
not to mention, pair programming/ merge review will be easier, making guiding juniors more efficient. of course i'm not saying it'll be all positive but there are legitimate reasons gitlab is doing this
Why does it have to be remote?
The whole point is that I don't always have internet access, sometimes there are outages and sometimes it's just plain slow for some reason. It's shit enough all the video calls I have to be involved in these days, not as bad as all the face the face meetings in crampt rooms with everyone falling asleep because of the lack of air circulation. Why do you want to make the development environment crappier?
It also isn't clear how it would make code reviews better, or even paired programming? Shared workspaces are already a thing.
This is a language/tooling issue, not a local Vs remote issue even though it may seem that way to people using languages that are only barely working on non-Linux systems.