The poor technicians having to RDP with (what I imagine must be) a horrible latency.

Once or twice a month, I have to RDP (now "Microsoft Windows App!") into a Windows XP machine on the other side of the continent through a jump box and a dialup connection.

Latency is bad, but not as terrible as you might think. The worst part is moving files between localhost and remote.

RDP in the windows XP days supported all kinds of tricks to work with low bandwidths like doing rendering on the client not the server.

I think most of those tricks have been disabled in modern windows for better security (you don't want some guest user able to feed your not-so-robust awfully complex rendering code some malicious inputs...)