[mtndew4brkfst]

In practice, the number one way to bungle a previously-working local environment at many of my past roles has been "brew upgrade". The number two way was to have MacOS and at least one Linux distribution used for local dev on the same team, but one vastly outnumber the other.

While I am very pro-containers as a deployment target I am also very resistant to containers in the critical feedback loop of local dev, chiefly due to iteration speed and performance/battery overhead, which was much more glaring when the Intel chips were all we had.

I can't endorse Nix in any capacity these days but it did seek to address multi platform environmental consistency, without containerization as your LCD.

[rcxdude]

I firmly believe MacOS and linux should be considered as different as windows and linux from the point of view of platform support. If the only time your software runs on MacOS is during development, you're probably wasting your time supporting another platform, and your developers are never developing against the target. "It's POSIX so it's the same" is a lie in basically all the ways that matter, you'll have a much easier time with a VM (by which I mean developing in the VM, not building a whole new VM/container in your development loop)

(And I don't think I've ever seen a dev macOS setup that could be called clean, but it's been a long time since I've interacted with that, so maybe the situation has gotten better since then)

[skydhash]

My problems went away the day I decided to run a Linux VM for MacOS. With Parallels (and the others) you can have a good dev setup and still run the other tools (slack, email,...) on MacOS.