> What does VSC do to mitigate that?
Basically it's not running a block filesystem over SSH at all. You are editing your files remotely. So there is no risk of block corruption (which has bitten me on the arse before).
In fact, if you log in twice to the same remote host as the same user using VSC, your editors will magically update each other, live. This is the underpinning of a pair-programming aspect of remote VSC that MS intend to productise.
And if you log into that machine and edit a file that is open in VSC Remote using something like vi, VSC will know about the changes. Plus you can edit very large files remotely.
Yes, you obviously could/can do all of your git stuff in a terminal window -- that is how I used to work even with VSC before the Remote facility was added. After 30 years of using unix I'm fine with that if I have to do it.
But you lose all the editor integrations, because git cannot work effectively over networked filesystems. Whereas with VSC Remote, all of that stuff works exactly as if it was local. Including almost all extensions, which install into the remote. The normal file search does not work well over a slow SSH filesystem link, because to search all those files they have to be downloaded, whereas file search in Remote mode is done by the remote.
What I like about this is being able to work with pretty much any machine that can support VSCode, without having to worry about installing dev tools on that machine. I then also use Vagrant so I can separate concerns among my clients (I'm kind of working in a pre-Docker world in the wider sense in the job I do, still, so Vagrant boxes and my own configuration system are a good substitute). Or I could edit inside WSL2, while VSC itself runs on the Windows machine.
I think Nova looks very nice indeed, and as a Mac user and erstwhile Transmit mega-fan I wish them well, but I was never impressed with Coda, which was interactively slow in the editor -- in some situations painfully so. (The iPad version was an occasional lifesaver but I use GoCoEdit there now.)
But it's pretty inescapable that VSC Remote is its killer feature. It's just that unless you've used it, it's hard to explain. Now that I know how much it has helped me, I can't envisage going back if I have the choice not to.