Why not just have everything you need on your local machine?

(I'm not a Mac user)

I am a Mac user and I’m curious to know too

Executing a bunch of npm modules locally, having a Mongo and Redis database running 24/7.

I don’t have a great answer. One thing I’ve noticed on Mac is that, using Activity Monitor, before installing all the dev dependencies for local dev nearly all processes seem to run under the local user’s user space, but after installing a bunch of stuff (with sudo) a ton of processes default to running as “system”

I haven’t had time to research whether this actually has a meaningful impact on security, but TLDR I trust Mac’s out of the box security, but I instantly stop trusting it the moment I start installing a bunch of stuff via Homebrew and NPM.

nvm for Node + use containers for database services?

tangent: fnm https://github.com/Schniz/fnm is faster than nvm and much cleaner in its shell integration.