> Most of those enterprise devs don't even get to touch the test/staging/prod environment, yet they still do their jobs.

They can usually run at least some part of the stack locally. Maybe not the full thing, at least part of it.

> Regarding the VM, today I guess it would be a bit ugly through Qemu but tooling is always solved if there's a need.

Tooling doesn't magically fix perf. Have you actually tried that specific setup? Searching online I get results like https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/12144 which aren't impressive, and I don't count as "reasonably performing".

Those results also jive with my experience - the meager demands of mobile apps are outrageously slow inside an ARM emulator running on x86 every time I've tried it, although I'll admit I haven't tried it on Qemu specifically. I can only imagine the horror of trying to run a full ARM server stack on x86 via emulator - perf is bad enough when it's native. For mobile, the first thing I do is fix the x86 builds (so I can use an x86 device emulator), buy a real ARM device out of my own pocket, and/or educate and/or fire my employer for their outrageously wasteful use of my time if they're serious about me and my coworkers using mobile ARM emulators on x86 for any serious length of time (that kind of waste of expensive resources like developer time can't possibly be a sustainable business decision.)