TRAMP is great, but to me it never feels the same as running locally. OTOH ssh -X (i.e. X forwarding) works for me for exactly this specific case (large and powerful remote dev box).
Incidentally my current setup is that I'm WFH and RDP'ing into my windows desktop, where I run VNC to our xvnc server where I ssh -X to the dev box where I run GUI emacs. It is surprisingly usable (I can also skip the RDP and run VNC directly if needed).
