founder/dev on this project here - exactly!! still trying to figure out the wording between "kubernetes development environment", "kubernetes-based application deploys", "application environments in-cluster", etc...i can tell it's not quite coming across clearly in the first go, but yeah you got the idea
you can even use ingress and special URL for multiple services in a one-off deviation, but things get really messy when you want to test state-level things too like db migrations.
besides making it more convenient to handle the chain of dependencies and duplicating all the services, we also want to make it easier to test db/state migrations and larger features without having to do an expensive e2e application deploy