I agree and it's why I personally invest so much time with things like Nix.

Nix offers a solution to being able to do a "cloud development environment", but on your local computer. It also allows you to easily setup the cloud development environment if you need one. While Docker works for setting up a new instance in a cloud provider, on a mac is a major pain so I don't really see it as a proper solution to the things Nix does for me.

But I can't help shake the feeling that Nix and Docker are just the best we have for now. I think the real solution to this involves far more changes before it's not just a pile of hacks. Eventually things will get bad enough that something will appear and it'll be adopted.

I don't think a VM per developer is the final version of this idea.