I have been observing it at my work - the production systems were getting more and more complicated and it was harder and harder to set up dev and test environments. It also started to break the underlying system when you had to install old libs for the project - and then maybe you needed two versions of the libs for different branches of the project. So I started to develop in virtual machines. Then people started using containers for that. That felt like a step back, because it was a different abstraction - and you had to do things differently on the dev machine that on production.
Then I learned that people use terraform or ansible to setup the production and I hoped that I could run the same scripts on my dev machine in a vm and have environment just like production. But no - when I encountered a project with terraform and ansible - the scripts contain lots of AWS related stuff, it is impossible to untangle it and run on dev machines. I have never learned kubernets, I don't do much programming any more, with containers both in production and dev that would make sense - but I still don't see scripts that would just spin off a dev environment. Maybe dev environments on a dev machine is really a dead end now - and what we need is a way to spin of dev envs in the cloud.
