Tramp is tolerable, but it is absolutely not great. You went on to demonstrate that right after making that claim, where you manually (and insufficiently) hack around its issues to arrive at something that is only barely comparable to eg what vs code can do.
Forgive my ignorance, but what does VSCode do?
Download a copy of itself onto the remote, run it there, and allow interaction with that copy
To be fair, for some dev workflows, TRAMP is lacking (LSPs), but it's more than enough if you're fine with grepping and ctags, I think. For the former scenario, I either run terminal emacs or use distrobox/toolbox (they setup everything for the wayland socket that graphical emacs needs)