[monoideism]

Most companies use remote dev APIs. You can have a versioned staging/production and then a dev API under continuous deployment is ideal, imho. This is an area where CI/CD shines.

A small company may run them locally as docker instance, but I think it's suboptimal and lots of unneeded overhead as you point out. If a frontend dev really needs to be offline, they can always switch to a docker instance (I haven't always had that option) but it's probably wise to normally use a remote dev API.