Its pretty sad given how most cloud providers price out IOPS.

I've had to explain numerous times to our engineers that their laptop is running around 10x the IOPS of our database (~40,000). Table scans are actually more performant on a dev laptop than a replica.

Have you considered shipping your dev laptops to the cloud? That would make deploying easier too.

Now I'm imagining an alternate reality where a Docker Container is like a caddy for laptops lining up the thunderbolt ports for hotswapping. And the delivery manager is the courier driver.

That sounds like a more functional version of blockchain tbh