I don't know if you've just chosen to assume the worst or don't care enough to think about it for more than a second but I've been very clear in all my comments that these are developer-specific machines we are deploying to. It's literally no different from running VMs on your local machine. There is full visibility and feedback, we aren't deploying to Prod or even QA, this is development where each developer has 2 or more boxes owned by them and only them. We also are working with specific custom hardware that our code runs on which is one reason we can't easily do this locally.
To jump in and call that "worst practice" is just lazy and condescending. On top of that, it's completely wrong.
I never asked for or requested input on how we deploy code/manage our servers. I was asking questions about an IDE vs vscode and gave 1 example of trying to do the same thing in both of them. Had I known so many people would come out of the woodwork to tell me I'm doing it wrong without any idea of how our stack works I wouldn't have mentioned it.
I have no aversion to running shell commands and you are being disingenuous by saying that. I have a problem with manually doing a step that I can automate. I write and run shell scripts all the time for one-off process but seeing the code I've actively writing in an environment that can run it is not one of those cases. In fact, anyone doing that manually is just being silly or obstinate. If you aren't automating something that you do 100's+ times a day then I question your skills.