Unit tests don't really fix the problem either. I'll have integration tests that run automatically during builds either way because I want to make sure other people are not breaking my stuff and there's no real difference in time between setting it up for 1 test or 1000.
The only solution I've found so far is try to bypass as much of the company-specific infrastructure as I can during development, but that requires learning a lot of docker/k8s/helm on top of knowing the company-specific stuff well enough to know what I can ignore on top of rake libraries that ~~abstracts~~ obfuscates the infrastructure.
Learning the k8s stuff I don't mind that much because as you say it's portable, but the company specific stuff... I doubt it's even portable across the company.
Work on the meta-problem that makes your problem easier. After all, you've got time if the baseline is low-productivity. And the lessons learned are portable.