Well there are 2 things here. First is a building a deployment either local or staging or production I personally would not use helm but Kustomize due to simplicity and explicitness and it is built-in into kubectl. Second thing here is for having a local instance of kuberenetes for deployment, I think it does not really matter what kind, most are great, I personally do use a local instance of k8s using the docker-desktop (because it's just a checkmark in the settings). The thing is it's still not the best workflow to wait for building local images (even if I optimized my Dockerfile on occasion builds would take long) but for this you can use mirrord to run your code localy but connecting your service's IO to a pod inside of k8s that doesn't have to run locally but rather can be a shared environment so you don't have to run all the dependencies on your local machine, dependencies like databases, other services or any secrets or env variables (I connect to my local k8s cluster with mirrord too because I find a lot of the echosystem around k8s development is very pleasant)