[plaguuuuuu]

Local development is extremely common in my area because the tooling is so good (dotnet).

However the most productive I've been was on a team where local development, even on a single service, was eschewed for the most part. We had tests that would cover 90+% of the codebase - more importantly nearly 100% of what was worth testing - and would routinely deploy things into staging from master that had never even been executed as a whole app, let alone run in anger and tested with live dependencies. The coverage was good enough that everything actually held together really well.

I'd never shipped anything that efficiently prior or since, it totally changed my view of TDD as being a time-consuming but safe and conservative regime vs my experience of it dramatically speeding up iteration.

The only thing that started gnawing at my brain (while admittedly operating a far lesser sized constellation of distributed services than, say, Facebook) was that there is no way of unit testing (or even statically verifying with TLA+ or something) the wider-scale structure of services, at least that I'm aware of. At some point I might knock something together involving specs and code generation but I dunno.