They are and the most common strategy I've seen people doing is to deploy separate environments to create dev environments which makes it even more complicated

They are and the most common strategy I've seen people doing is to deploy separate environments to create dev environments which makes it even more complicated IMHO. I am not sure if other providers makes it more easy though. For us, that we are 100% in AWS, with Lambdas/S3/DynamoDB it's been very hard to create local environments and being a small team we have ignored it and testing our features all three of us in the same "dev" environment before going to production.