The hope would be that we would stop trying to chase our tails keeping up to date with K8s, and instead we could maintain a more generic abstraction layer which could be applied to other PaaS/SaaS systems as well. You use the abstractions to separate the design from the implementation. The "desktop" implementation could be insecure, non-HA, non-robust, easy to install & maintain. The "cloud" implementation could be all the best practices. The containers would be the same, but the service definition, command-line tools, etc could all be different, and just be written to interface with the abstraction specification.
Obviously you still would need to completely test the hell out of the service in the cloud cluster before releasing to production, but the initial local development could be much faster when done locally in a simpler system. I think trying to replicate the cloud implementation locally is just asking for trouble, we know it will never match up.