Approaches to data migration on Rails applications

It’s not that they’re unwilling, it’s that people have convenient data built up over time for local dev. Resetting would throw it away. You could have a shared data pack or seeds (which aren’t exactly meant for this), but that’s also a thing you have to maintain.

I appreciate your rule-breaking spirit, but you’re replacing one rule that can be broken, with another that cannot (so nobody else besides you gets to be a rule breaker).