Earlier quoted context omitted.
That extension is a competitive advantage that's crippling Jetbrains. Just business as usual.
I was honestly very surprised that Jetbrains didn't already have a remote plugin. I know that I wouldn't consider any new editor without one, as I almost always develop on a remote box.
This uses SSH and SCP to automatically deploy the code to the remote environment and run it with the interpreter on that machine, rather than your own local laptop/desktop. One advantage is that it does not require any special software to be installed on the remote server. VS Code's solution requires a pretty hefty installation consisting of basically an entire copy of VSCode onto the remote server.
The downside of JetBrain's approach... I believe that it requires a local copy of the files in order to perform the "LSP"-like syntax error highlighting / suggestion functionality that JetBrains software is so lauded for. This could be difficult/inconvenient if your codebase is particularly enormous, or if you aren't allowed to mirror it locally.
However, given the amount of support that JetBrains has for this kind of setup, I wouldn't be shocked to see an additional future option for something more in the style of "VS Code Remote Development"
0: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/configuring-remote-in...