The point of tools like this is for development, not staging. By “development” I don’t just mean developers writing code, but any unit tests that require behavioural testing that cannot easily be mocked too.

So by the time you’re ready to push to staging you should be past the point of wanting to emulate AWS and instead pushing to UAT/test/staging (whatever your naming convention) AWS accounts.

Ideally you would have multiple non-production environments in AWS and if your teams are well staffed then your dedicated Cloud Platform / DevOps team should be locking these non-prod environments from developers in the same way as they do to production too.

Bonus points if you can spin up ephemeral environments automatically for feature branches via CI/CD. But that’s often impractical / not pragmatic for your average cloud-based project.