I have worked in big environments. My idea about "big" might be naive, environments spanning different Oses and different, including old languages like fortran and pascal. But I never been in a situation where I couldn't check out said code, and open it in my ide and build it. If you can't that sounds like a another case of deficient tooling. Justifying deficient tooling.

These where not some SWE wonderlands either. The code was truly awful at times.

The Joel test is 25 years old. It's a industry standard. I, and many other people consider it a minimum requirement for software engineering. If code the "2. Can you make a build in one step?" requirement i should be ide-browsable in one step.

If it takes weeks to replicate a setup the whole environment is deeply flawed. The one-step build is the second point on the list because Joel considered it the second most important thing, out of 12.