Comment by saulrh

Tramp is perfectly able to write, it's just that it does it by writing a temp file locally and then using ssh to transfer the file to the remote, rather than installing a copy of itself on the remote and acting through that. It only uses executables that it finds on the remote. So if make and gcc and sed and such are available it's basically transparent, indistinguishable from local editing except for network round trips, and the only changes it leaves behind are the files you edit.