This is pretty great advice for any legacy code project. Even outside of C++ there is a huge amount of code bases out there that do not compile/run on a dev mac

This is pretty great advice for any legacy code project. Even outside of C++ there is a huge amount of code bases out there that do not compile/run on a dev machine without tons of work. I once worked on a Java project that due to some weird dependencies, the dev mode was to run a junit test which started spring and went into an infinite loop. Getting a standard run to work helped a ton.