Brittle local development in from what I've seen is either due to another symptom of tech debt - an aging monolith with too many different build systems, dependencies and what have you that you end up with way too many Docker containers or the need to have a very long doc for newcomers with "run this script here, then that script there, unless it's a Monday, then run this script over there". Or a team that's gone all-in on a distributed microservices architecture with lambdas all over the place and a dozen or more repos and it's literally impossible (yes there's LocalStack but...) to get a faithful end-to-end local environment up and running.

The nightmarish local development experience of either case are symptoms of deeper issues than local development itself being a problem.