Depending on what you're actually able to run of the Android apps, there's a lot that you could do with one of these even just for local development just with the Android subsystem.
Shell? Yep, several options (BusyBox, Termux, others?). I was going to suggest Terminal IDE but it's apparently incompatible with anything modern, but I suspect there are other options out there.
Language-aware editors? Yep, things like AIDE, Termux (for vim or emacs), DroidEdit, etc.
Servers? Yep, the only one I ever played with (years back) was Servers Ultimate Pro[1], but I'm sure there are a variety of other tools.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icecoldapp... No Apache, but nginx and lightttpd. MySQL but no Postgres. Not for production use certainly, but for local development?
If you're in developer mode (a one time key combo at boot, or a hardware switch under a cover on older machines), you can just ctrl-alt-T and 'shell' and you're in bash w/ the ability to sudo. If you want a more complete userland, crouton[1] will bootstrap an ubuntu setup in a chroot and you can apt-get away, plus it will give you X11 and some integration between that and the native chromeos stuff.
I've used a couple chromebooks as my primary laptop doing dev work for ~5 years now. The only time I ever carry a bigger machine is if I have specific tasks that need really big chunks of memory and/or disk.