Never in my life did I want development process to be centralized

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.