I like this workflow, use something like mutagen to sync from your local environment to the remote machine. For me, I prefer jetbrains IDEs so I tried using jetbrains gateway, it’s really buggy and slow. I prefer to use jetbrains ides on my local machine and use VSCode remote for interacting with the remote machine.

I wonder though, is it worth it to setup a remote dev machine if you have an M1 Mac?

I think you can get good compile times for Rust etc. on an M1. For me I have an intel Mac at work and at home so the remote dev env is better for builds.