I have a problem similar to this but not exactly the same. What I would like is for the whole company (assume a run off the mill ecommerce store for this example), regardless of the company size to be able to fit all (I guess almost all) their code on one physical machine (or I guess a set of physical machines). Let's assume we can stub out any external dependencies such as vendors or customers.

We should be able to run the whole system end to end and have a coherent story. We should be able to pull changed from production and be able to run it on this one machine and verify that all the steps work exactly as expected.

I joined a team that was getting into micro services. They enthusiastically told me about their domains and bounded contexts and how I had access to all the repos and could run them on my machine. So my question was how can I run them all together on my machine end to end and the answer was silence as if I had kicked a baby.

Edit: thank you for your added context with the authentication library. It makes sense why the architects and lead developers were not interested in having the whole system run end to end on a developer machine. They want to have that tight "inner loop" and have developers working in that inner loop and not worry about the rest.