If you've ever read "Working Backwards" it's interesting to see how Amazon today is basically the polar opposite of everything they talk about in the book. I wonder what the author's opinion is.
You're limited by the resources available to you on your local laptop and when you close that laptop the dev environment stops running. Remote dev environments are more costly and complicated to maintain but they can be shared, can scale vertically (or horizontally) on demand, can persist when you exit them, and managing access to various internal services from dev environments can in some cases be simpler.
It also centralizes dev environment management to the platform team that owns them and provides them as a service which cuts down on support tickets related to broken dev environments. There are certainly some trade offs though and for most companies a local VM or docker compose file will be a better choice.
In the YC Youtube videos it's amusing that they (Jason and the other guy) almost always reference Google and Facebook despite the fact that neither of those companies were YC companies and none of the YC companies out of 4000+ funded (not even Stripe) come close to the scale or valuation of either Google or Facebook.
Is it impressive though? They have about a 50% success rate delivering things to me across multiple addresses and I know other people who have had similar long term issues.
Yeah but let's say your time is worth $60/hr. If you save only 40 minutes per month then you've broken even. Basically one lunch break. Some things are just a hassle to do, personally I would try to self host the Next app but I definitely see where the author is coming from purchasing Vercel.