“The best tooling in the world will struggle to make up for “regularly losing a day debugging your environment,” and so getting that aspect right can easily outweigh almost any other decisions you make.”
Stripe ran development code on cloud devboxes and kept editors on laptops, joined by a sync script installed as a launchd service on every machine. When the API needed Redis, the team adding it shipped the Puppet config to every devbox. Nobody lost a morning asking why master broke their laptop. It took a dedicated team and years of funding, which most companies refuse and then wonder where the days went.