“But having worked at more than one company that’s tried this approach, my experience is that very few people end up happy.”
A Chromebook plus a cloud VM looks cheaper on the spreadsheet. Then you hit no GPU, choppy video, broken screen readers and WebAuthn that can’t reach the VM. At any company over about 20 people, someone hits one of those, and you still need the old IT team for them. The savings live in the pitch deck. The costs live on the developers’ desks.