[yaakov]

Well, StackOverflow devs are able to cheat and load up the site on their local machine if they want to

[bboreham]

Anyone can download the underlying data and look at it on their local machine.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

[mevile]

I'm not sure I like the idea of being able to connect to a prod db from a dev instance, but whatever floats your boat.

[jsmeaton]

I doubt they'd allow that either - but database exports are a thing or they could just query the database or elasticsearch themselves.

[progval]

There are public dumps of Stack Overflow's database. https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

[flukus]

Who says they have to? The can just restore a recent backup.