Can you believe the nerve of that guy? Keeps trying to convince us that a single centrally managed system is easier or more reliable (or whatever) than 30 randomly configured ones on multiple operating systems! I think he's nuts, personally. I have half a mind to tell my manager that he's trying to disrupt our ideal workflows.
And really, what's the problem with testing my app in an environment that isn't the same as production? Yeah, sure, I might save some time not having to maintain a local environment that everyone on my team can replicate. And, sure, developing remotely would let me change laptops without spending a week to set everything up again; but it's only a week, I have a ton of those left. And yeah, maybe the cloud network has a bunch of services that I need proxies and VPNs and other things to test from my laptop. And granted, doing development on a server with 40 CPU cores and the same network as the database and webserver is faster than my laptop.
...But if all that was better, I'd be doing it already. If it's on my laptop, I know how it works. What's better than what you already know?
It sounds like something really frustrating is going on though, and I hope it works out.
You sound really frustrated because you're being asked to do things that you feel aren't or shouldn't be part of your job, and perhaps it's taking time from your other responsibilities and creating a larger workload for you. It seems like maybe you've come to resent your coworkers and their individual preferences for the complexity it creates and the stress it causes you. It seems like what you want to do is erase that complexity, take away their agency, and centralize on a solution that works well for you.
There's a couple of things to consider. For one, what you're asking is for your coworkers to have a degraded work experience so that your work experience can be better, which is totally understandable but not reasonable.
Another one is that this is a pretty well understood problem with known solutions - why is it you can't get them implemented? Is there something going on in the politics or culture of your workplace that is stopping you? Is there some kind of elephant in the room, and would things get better if you called it out?
The last one is, are you getting burned out? Were you always this frustrated? Should you take some time off? Should you start looking for other jobs?
I can really feel the stress and frustration in your tone, and that sucks. I hope things get better for you.
Granted, we don’t run any node, python or Ruby, because yeah I don’t want to spend all of my time debugging monkey patching bugs.