We have interns coming in and fully ready within an hour or two of setup. Same way changing local machines is a breeze with very little downtime.
As you point out rebuilding small test datasets instead of just filtering the prod DB is an option, but those also need maintenance, and take a hell of time to make sure all the relevant cases are covered.
Basically, trying to flee from the bulk and complexity tends to bring a different set of hurdles and missing parts that have to be paid in time, maintenance and bugs only discovered in prod.
PS: the test DB is still reset everyday. Eorse thing happening is we need to do something else for a few hours until it's restored.
This sounds like the result of a company investing in tooling, rather than something specific to a remote dev env. Our local dev env takes 3 commands and less than 3 hours to go from a new laptop to a fully working dev env.