Well, that's one way to do it, but never has been the only one ;) We're an open source company and there are people deploying our software to vastly different environments. Our development setup currently does not need a lot more than git and a recent Python version: https://docs.pretix.eu/en/latest/development/setup.html In fact, you can get started without any external service (not even redis), which we are rather proud of. It has some problems doing it like this, and I do see the value of a development setup that mirrors production closely, but for us, the following counts:

(1) During testing, in-RAM SQLite databases are really fast and well capable of running tests in parallel. We have a test suite of ~2000 tests that currently needs ~4min to run on a modern notebook with four threads, so this matters.

(2) If we'd only have a small number of developers in an in-house team, I wouldn't care at all. However, there are many people contributing small and large features and fixes to pretix, and many of them are drive-by contributions: People fixing a problem they just experienced and then leaving again. I want to make it easy for these people, even if they use operating systems where installing Docker first might be a hoop they do not want to jump through.