Well, most of the IDEs still perform all of the work on the remote machine and just stream IO to the laptop, so you're not actually editing files on the laptop, you're sending file editing commands to the remote machine, all the compilation and execution stuff happens on the remote machine, etc. For example, VS Code has client/server components which make the experience feel seamless and handle network disruptions to hide latency and make it feel like it's all happening locally. This setup works pretty great if you're mostly editing text files, i.e. source code.

Actually mounting a remote disk solves a different set of problems, such as if you need to edit something that doesn't support doing the work on the remote machine or if you want to explore the remote disk in Finder or some other GUI.