Why would I want to run an emacs layer adding more latency to my work to turn Emacs in to Vim when, as I said, I can do everything in Emacs I can do in Vim.

> (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)

Because it will randomly freeze and it's single threaded, it's slow, and it's also not novel. Vim can also edit files over SSH, VSCode can run itself remotely.