I'm not sure I agree with the linked article, are there any other (accessible, and existent in the present) resources you used to arrive at this decision?

For one, the article assumes the tools you use to replicate your production environment locally aren't accurate; with localstack, they are accurate. It's seamless, truly. I recommend you give it a try instead of spending the extra cash to have your developers deploy into the cloud constantly.

Another thing to note is that this seems only true for a specific architecture, if you're writing serverless functions. Not everyone is or should be doing that, so I'm not sure "you should always test in the cloud" applies as a "context free" rule.

Finally, it sounds like the author had a lot of trouble getting his local environment to work. Maybe folks who have a bit more experience working with the technologies involved in their services don't have that problem, and it's a little arrogant to assume that, just because you had a problem, that it's a problem for everyone else, too.

Overall, I just don't think commenting, "This service nice, but using it is an anti-pattern" was quite as productive of a comment, in general, as you meant it to be.