We’ve had this discussion for other versions of SharePoint so I am interested to see if it’s changed now a coupe of years have passed. Do you develop with SharePoint on a desktop / laptops or are you using a VM in the Azure? If you are using a physical machine what spec are you running?
I run VM with my vmware workstation which from my point is better than hyper-V. I use it for farm and sandbox solution.
But also I have started build solution in the host environment (windows 10) with VS, VS code, Node.js, Angular, etc. And it seems that this second option is going to be more popular, as SharePoint framework is coming. And some other technologies are going to be must know, like React, KnockoutJS, RequireJS.
So our world is changing… Again.