Short-lived environments look clean on paper, but many real workflows need continuity: a long-running agent, a warm cache, or a shell session that still makes sense the next day.
A remote computer keeps the mental model small. You connect, work, disconnect, and resume. That is often more valuable than shaving a little time off setup.
The tradeoff is operational simplicity versus infrastructure complexity. A good product should hide the second while keeping the first obvious.