I've worked that way for 10 years. My current desktop is a 5 year old Intel i3 NUC with a paltry 8G of memory. Granted, it uses all that memory (and a bit more) for a browser and slack, and the fan spins up any time a video plays. But usually it's silent, can drive a 4k monitor, and most of the time I'm just using mosh and a terminal, which require nearly nothing.
OTOH, the machine that I'm connecting to has 32c/64t, half a terabyte of RAM and dozens of TB of storage.
A lot of what I do is compiling, so for that I'd still be fine with fewer cores and a lot less RAM. But I also do backtesting of trading strategies, and for that I can use all the cores I can get. The memory is needed to cache the massive amount of data that is being read from a pair of 2T NVME SSDs. Without adequate caching, I/O can easily become the bottleneck, even though the SSDs are pretty fast.
OTOH, the machine that I'm connecting to has 32c/64t, half a terabyte of RAM and dozens of TB of storage.