I find the debugging and testing process pretty slow with AWS SAM so I may have to try this out when you have a Node runtime.
Doesn't something like localstack.cloud help with this need? I've just recently inherited some NodeJS lambdas and am thinking of looking into that to debug/develop locally.
Local stack seems to be invite only
LocalStack is open source: https://github.com/localstack/localstack
Looks like they're starting a Pro version that requires signup/payment.