I disagree. Yes, fully replicating the production environment is not possible for big apps or apps with customer data, no discussion there. But when you want to debug components, test error conditions etc, a copy is extremely important. You can do "[DEBUG] added some logging" commits left, right and center, but it's not going to replace a debugger.

Additionally, you might want to create custom or corrupt datasets. Yes, you can theoretically add a flag, but then this flag needs to be checked everywhere and might come with its own bugs. Using the "customers_debug" table instead of "customers" table (for example) works as well, but then you replicated staging in your production environment - added complexity which is definitely _not_ needed.

Lastly, this misses the other points the article makes - a local copy allows you to freely play with the configuration, shut down related services etc. You can not do that in production.

But I'll give you that - resiliency in production is still very necessary and you usually won't be able to replicate everything locally. The ability to run local isn't everything - but that was not the point the article was making.