Local dev is great until production gets complex enough that you lose parity. That'll happen even earlier now that we run x86 on the server but ARM locally.

At my company we don't support local dev nor have any sort of staging environment. We have development linux servers connected to prod services and dbs. There are no pragmas or build flags to perform things differently in "dev". Things are gated with feature flags.

It scared me at first but now I think it makes sense: staging is always a pain and doing it this way we avoid parity problems between staging and prod. Local development would be impossible for a system at our scale but I think even a staging setup would result in more defects—not fewer.