It's a great design for development since your dev environments are isolated and you can have multiple, without risking breaking your main OS.

I use a combination of toolbox, distrobox, flatpak, docker, homebrew, junest and custom bwrap scripts.

I do. I use toolboxes for pretty much all my development. I've scripted the setup each type of toolbox I use, so they can be reproduced. I use a terminal editor (neovim), but I think it's possible to run vscode from a toolbox too[1].

For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy.

The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_...