I work at a company that has similar practices to what you describe (we don’t run our services locally). While it’s hard to get used to at first, I think the silver lining is that it forces everyone to write good unit tests, since it’s the only efficient way to run their code before publishing a PR. Having worked on the opposite end (at a team where we mostly tested locally and had almost no automated tests), I much prefer this environment.
My last job was working at a company where you could not bring up the app locally. It didn't start that way. When the company was smaller I could develop a whole feature from the backend to the frontend and see the whole flow. As we grew it became increasingly difficult to run the app locally. Then it became impossible. Bugs grew and development time increased honstly 4x to do the same feature I could have done 3 years ago. I now think a good clean developer experience is key to a stable app.
