It's not ideal right now but cloud dev is clearly the way it's going. I'd say buying el cheapo chromebook + cloud dev environment would work out to be cheaper even if the cloud provider somehow screwed up and took off(not been my experience but i haven't needed to work with k8 yet)
I work at a financial institution that is going the reverse, potentially because of internal issues - the dev environment is underprovisioned, and I guess they can't/won't beef it up, so all the developers are going back from virtual desktops to fully loaded for local dev and testing.
On AWS K8s provisioning a basic 4-node cluster to sit there and do nothing costs over $300 per month. The amount you spend in a year can be used to build an unreasonably powerful cluster in your home or office.
