Having worked in tech for 10+ years through various positions I consistently hit the same problem: setting up local environment is hard. Situation got better thanks to Docker, Nix and alike but it's still difficult to manage secrets & some configs locally as they're often not versioned for good reasons. This hits pretty hard when you have to play with Infra as Code / GitOps projects and/or multi-environment contexts (e.g. Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi...)
Most often the issue is not "My company does not allow access to environment X", but more something like "CI is configured with a bunch of secrets / env vars and there's no way I reproduce all of that voodoo magic locally. I'll just commit and wait for my changes to be executed on CI."
Tired of this situation, I developed Novops: it helps manage and share secrets/configs safely so it can be used both locally and by CI/CD. Secrets can be referenced from various sources (e.g. Hashicorp Vault, AWS, GCloud, Azure...) and loaded as files or environment variables. It also handle multi-environments setup along with various helper features (such as automatically impersonate AWS IAM Role).
Novops just needs a YAML file referencing your secret sources so it can load them in your environment.