While this is absolutely a "best practice" I really think there is a pretty big divide here between the best practice and what happens In The Real World (strictly by number of developers). Between $DAYJOB, consulting/freelancing, and the internet/tech twitter/HN/etc, I've seen basically three groups:

1. FAANG, startup, etc. that probably follows this best practice "cattle over pets" methodology more often than not. 90% of developers do not work here. For the same reason you can't compare FAANG salaries to really anything else, you can't compare their tooling and infrastructure either. They're playing a completely different game than most people.

2. Indie developers who want to mess around with this stuff.

3. Boring companies with IT departments where you have to request VM resources and wait for them to get spun up. I worked for a place within the last decade where the idea of getting a VM provisioned for you in less than 2 business days was laughable. This was a publicly traded, multi billion dollar company with probably 800 developers, IT, and support desk folks on staff and did not make any money from its software directly (we were not a profit center).

I am considerate of the "well you should just" mindset when it comes to dev ops and infrastructure, but most developers don't work in that environment. If the company has never had that sort of expertise or expense before, it's a hard sell especially if it's coming from a developer who has never worked in that environment before. And truthfully, the last thing I want to do as a software engineer is become "the devops guy" and now be responsible for the VM infrastructure of the entire team rather than actually writing code.