Hmm, I've never worked at a company where this was a requirement. In fact, I've worked at companies where the majority of the time, the developer environments n

Hmm, I've never worked at a company where this was a requirement. In fact, I've worked at companies where the majority of the time, the developer environments never came close to the production environments. What has mattered most is that a staging env mirror the prod env. This I have experienced and built numerous times. Also, an integration env between development and staging has also been fairly common.