This is an extremely well researched, thought-out, and written article kudos swyx.
If take Shopify's cloud dev journey article as a guide: This is a rather abstract discussion on vs code remote container dev env via kubernetes pods managed by an org on a cloud with standardized images which can be customized with yml. Instead of customizing the remote container Dockerfile manually, the dev user adds the dependency to the configuration file and it is written automatically into the script to create the environment.
Once inside the container (the user's virtual machine environment), user can leverage docker-compose.yml to orchestrate his microservices.
But at the end of the day, the kubernetes part of it is irrelevant to the developer. It is mere infrastructure for hosting a workspace which is configurable by people familiar with the matter. Orchestrating microservices and scaling them is obviously 2 different things. We don't need kubectl to network containers. We can open a port with environmental variables in a docker-compose.yml file. For development of course.
as a footnote i think okteto dev environment encapsulates all of that pretty well.
ps. i would like to characterize customizable, but standardized remote container dev as 'environment as a service' (EAAS)