So we develop the code and deploy into QA, often breaking things. Cycle times are measured in hours to days. Breaking QA is sometimes a fireable offense. Lol.
The leads and architects are correct in my case; it would be impossible and too expensive to do. This is because our services are built on hundreds of bespoke manual configurations made along the way to production. Discovering and pulling into code/automation would be a whole months/year long project in itself.
That said there are ways of developing locally without running everything locally. Pull in the code of the service you want to work on locally and just point to QA for its dependencies. Most times it takes some finagling of code but it usually works.
Even if everything was running locally, often generating usable data is the biggest barrier. In QA thousands of hands have generated partly useable data. It’s a hard problem to solve since I don’t want to have to know about data requirements for every service.