This is my preferred way of doing things as well. Not being able to run the exact same thing that's running in CI easily locally is a bit of a red flag in my op

This is my preferred way of doing things as well. Not being able to run the exact same thing that's running in CI easily locally is a bit of a red flag in my opinion. I think the only exception I've ever encountered to this is when working on client software for HSMs, which had some end-to-end tests that couldn't be run without actually connecting to the specific hardware that took some setup to be able to access when running tests locally.