While this is true that a local computer is often faster than a single cloud instance, I've often noticed code running on cloud instances (dev servers, etc) end up finishing their task more quickly.

It's usually because most tasks I do end up being limited by the network connection to other resources (Postgres DBs, etc). The dev server being in the same datacenter as the resource is a huge advantage in terms of both latency and bandwith.

Again, this is mostly observations from my own workloads, and other people's use cases may be different.