You sound like a painful teacher. Who cares if the students are using vscode+remote? Are they learning the material? Are they building good software? This is uni for christ sake, not an apollo mission. The entire purpose of a university environment is to foster learning and development, to open up a safe space for learning. Not to suffocate them with arbitrary and excessive rules.
Things need to be introduced at the right gradient. If you pile it on all at once, nothing is learned. If you want to teach someone how to use SSH to interact with a server, then that should be a dedicated chapter or portion of the curriculum. Once you are beyond that and it comes down to building programs, you need to eliminate that part of the gradient and focus 100% on mastering the task at hand.
