This is basically it. When I started programming in C, I used a debugger all the time. Even a bit later doing Java monoliths I could spin up the whole app on my local and debug in the IDE. But nowadays running a dozen processes and containers and whatnot, it's just hopeless. The individual developer experience has gone very much backwards in the microservice era so the best thing to do is embrace observability, feature toggles etc and test in prod or a staging environment somewhere outside of your local machine.