[crabmusket]

In the JS world it's common to have hot-reloading development servers, whereas the production environment does not do that. And with the rise of TS, transpilation and bundling are also a thing on the backend, not just for shipping web assets. Once the bundle is done, all your production server needs is `index.js` and `node`, not `tsc`, `webpack` or whatever else you're using.

[airocker]

‘Node’ on dev may run differently than node on production depending on version of dependencies , for eg a shared object file it loads.

[crabmusket]

Yes, of course that could happen. All I'm suggesting is that the optimally productive tradeoff is somewhere in between "develop in a full clone of production cloud" and "works on my machine and nowhere else".