What was the point of microservice architecture if you can't develop each service individually in the first place? Sounds to me like the architecture you're talking about isn't an actual microservice, and it's just ball 'o mud over TCP instead of as a single monolith.

At a previous place of work I worked with a monolith structure, and it was actually perfectly fine. Development got done separately on several large substructures in the monolith, and devs could install the whole project locally and run it just fine.

I'm really wondering why we're all using microservice architecture if we're all convinced that to actually develop on them, devs need to reproduce 50odd of those services locally for debugging. Then what was the point?