we actually have a panel discussion on this at coalesce featuring matt housley and others. https://coalesce.getdbt.com/agenda/panel-discussion-fixing-t...
dbt folks actually brought this idea to us because it just makes so much sense -- no translating of sql between dev and prod.
highlights from panel brainstorming from winnie @ dbt: Local development: should be fast, representative but not comprehensive of prod data, and independent of cloud services if I want that.
The alternative has been that people typically use a schema in their production platform for development, CI workflows, etc. Costly and cloud-dependent.
DuckDB and its role in facilitating the MDS-in-a-box pattern has been a game changer for local data development, which ramped up the ability to share data, modeling work, and analysis the way we share open source tooling, but syntax remained an issue for deployment.
A recurring painpoint I've seen at multiple data engineering organizations is the local development experience when using cloud data warehouses, so this is potentially very interesting.