It is not reasonably easy, I can't set it up completely with "git clone" and it does not stay inside the project (that's an issue when your developers use a huge variety of operating systems with varying installed and configured software). That means a lot of time lost during problem solving with the hundreds of developers I work with, most of them have never even heard about nginx, they're developers, not sysadmins.

There absolutely should not be any nasty surprises with switching a reverse proxy, and you can cover that with end to end tests. Such issue would be a bug in the reverse proxy.

Of course there are things like Docker, but that implies performance issues on Mac.