Not endorsing this point blank but.. One positive side effect of this is that it becomes much easier to rally folks into improving the fidelity of the dev envir

Not endorsing this point blank but.. One positive side effect of this is that it becomes much easier to rally folks into improving the fidelity of the dev environment, which has compound positive impact on productivity (and mental health of your engineers). In my experience at Big Tech Corp, dev environments were reduced to low unit test fidelity over years, then as a result you need to iterate (ie develop) in a staging environment that is orders of magnitude slower (and more expensive if you're paying for it). It isn't unusual that waiting for integration tests is the majority of your day. Now, you might say that it's too complex so there's no other way, and yes sometimes that's the case, but there's nuance! Engineers have no incentive to fix dev if staging/integration works at all (even if super slow) so it's impossible to tell. If you think slow is a mild annoyance, I will tell you that I had senior engineers on my team that committed around 2-3 (often small) PRs per month.