Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and you aren’t able to just walk up to vim somewhere else Is this something people do? I use a handful of machines and use git+stow for managing my vimrc. I've never had this problem where I need to "walk up to vim somewhere else" where I wouldnt just clone my dotfiles and stow my vim config. Takes all of 10 seconds and I'm up and running.
In my routine work in an academic lab, im using 10-15 machines plus a number of GCP instances. Syncing a .dotfiles repo is a huge pain, especially when you make a small change on one machine and don’t want to push/pull ever time you want to do anything on another machine.
Since checking on every terminal open is unnecessary, I check on a probabilistic basis based on how often the backing git repo changes (0.5% - 3%, different repos for vim, dotfiles, configs).