Only /home survives a session — everything else rebuilds fresh.
The same stateless-container-plus-volume trade-off application workloads already use, applied to developer tooling.
Container imageTools, system packages — rebuilt fresh every session
/home (persistent disk)User files, settings — survives restarts
Best practice: build custom images from Google's preconfigured base images, scan them with Artifact Analysis the same way as production images — an unpatched workstation image is a real risk surface too.