SFTP is as secure as any other SSH connection and people use those extremely regularly to remotely administer hosts which lack a VPN.
Aside from terrible Windows support SFTP is likely one of the best secure remote file transfer protocols around (in particular for freeform file transfers, rather than structured like AS2 or similar).
That's still a silly point. For security reasons a lot of people don't hook their source control directly into production web-servers, and instead deploy from a secured environment hooked into secure control onto production (which would still require something like e.g. SFTP for the actual transfer).
Regardless their point was poorly explained/explored.
Correct, workflow. Even with the tools themselves, rather than "best practice" it seems mind boggling using SFTP within the editor. With things like SASS, bower, grunt, npm and the like - it doesn't even seem like it'd be compatible.
Well I use a dev virtual server instead of a local vm. I enjoy working in a windows environment, but would rather not struggle with the discrepancies between running an app on windows with something like xampp vs apache on centos which are my web servers.
I use a sftp atom plugin to workin on/save to my dev server and just use ssh to do git/etc right on the server. I don't see how this workflow is very different than working locally and using a command prompt for all of your tools.
SFTP is as secure as any other SSH connection and people use those extremely regularly to remotely administer hosts which lack a VPN.
Aside from terrible Windows support SFTP is likely one of the best secure remote file transfer protocols around (in particular for freeform file transfers, rather than structured like AS2 or similar).
Certainly better than FTPS.