While that’s generally true, the inputs and outputs and execution environment that you can count on is well-documented on AWS Lambda. That means that recreation of execution environment for the function in question is pretty reasonable locally (why is this not a thing then Amazon?!?). For the rest of AWS, you can either get credentials in place for access or mock those out somehow, but that’s not officially supported either.
I feel like the service is leaving a bunch of easy work on the table that would let people have a local development process that mirrors the remote development reality.
It is a thing; unfortunately it's not officially supported but I also find it crazy that so many developers are fine doing dev directly on "the cloud", as if that's a reasonable use of their time.
Lack of understanding, I think every new dev to serverless will have this stage of frustration, then eventually will find a way to do better with creative ideas, I myself never run lambda in the cloud I write a UT for my handler and assume I know the input and the expected output, I mock everything except step functions I use the official jar from AWS.
I feel like the service is leaving a bunch of easy work on the table that would let people have a local development process that mirrors the remote development reality.