On the contrary, it does help a lot. Offline VSCode might be just a glorified broswer, but web VSCode will hook automatically with the vendors development/build/code repo backends. And you could have the appropriate environment (eg. a linux version x, with y libs, and z servers running) per project, available everywhere you go with no setup of your own.
>presumably they would have to give you a laptop to access it, and any laptop that can run it in the browser can run it offline, this is 99% the same codebase.
Yes, and then you can install this or that, diverge from the common environment, and so on. And you have to setup all of those, even if it's just some docker instance running locally or some cloud stuff you access.
With the bundled web-vscode+cloud-backend, you wont have to.
>Codespaces makes sense because you don't even have to clone your code, and the compute/build happens elsewhere. Plus collaborative features can be added with no hassle because authentication is already baked in.
Codespaces is the whole idea behind this too. In other words, this is just a component of codespaces / a codespaces type deal.