Sure France is smaller but it was in 1789, going to Paris at this time would take days or weeks, now in a day or two anyone with a car could move through the US.
The communication is way easier now, it’s much easier to get organized on a large scale.
If I understand well you want to have the same OS, software, configuration and files on different devices.
You could have a look at nixos.
I’m doing something similar, I have a computer in my office for work and a laptop at home for personal use and a bit of work.
I have a config shared between the two computers, they share similar modules but also have their own specificities.
This way when I configure VSCode for example I get the configuration synced on both.
For synching my files I’m using a synology NAS.
I’m adding https://www.survivorlibrary.com/ to the list