There's a lot of negative comments, so I'll just put out - I enjoyed reading this and appreciate the time put into explaining this.
What does your dev/sandbox environment look like? Are you using localstack?
What does your dev/sandbox environment look like? Are you using localstack?
Thanks for your support in the middle of this.
To answer your question: our dev environment is iso to staging and production with AWS accounts for each developer. The cost is close to 0. Deploying and testing a code change takes seconds. Deploying and testing a config change however is still a little bit longer for sure...