Running a local k8s cluster doesn't guarantee that a remote cluster on some cloud provider will work the same either.

I've heard of and worked with multiple dev teams that develop with compose and deploy a totally different way (k8s, AWS auto scaling groups, heroku, etc), to great success.

Devs know about compose and understand it. As long as the containers behave as planned, the DevOps people can figure out how to deploy them on whatever production environment.