This is certainly one of the critical mistakes you did.
No developer needs to launch half of the company's services to work on a local deployment. That's crazy, and awfully short-sighted.
The only services a developer ever needs to launch locally are the ones that are being changed. Anything else they can consume straight out of a non-prod development environment. That's what non-prod environments are for. You launch your local service locally, you consume whatever you need to consume straight from a cloud environment, you test the contract with a local test set, and you deploy the service. That's it.
> I guess one can grumble about bad architecture all day but this had to be solved.
Yes, it needs to be solved. You need to launch your service locally while consuming dependencies deployed to any cloud environment. That's not a company problem. That's a problem plaguing that particular service, and one which is trivial to solve.
> Both FAANG companies I’ve worked at had remote dev environments that were built in house.
All FANG companies I personally know had indeed remote dev environments. They also had their own custom tool sets to deploy services locally, either in isolation or consuming dependencies deployed to the cloud.
This is not a FANG cargo cult problem. This is a problem you created for yourself out of short-sightedness and for thinking you're too smart for your own good. Newbies know very well they need to launch one service instance alone because that's what they are changing. Veterans know that too well. Why on earth would anyone believe it's reasonable to launch 50 services to do anything at all? Just launch the one service you're working on. That's it. If you believe something prevents you from doing that, that's the problem you need to fix. Simple. Crazy.
