Backend developers are already conditioned to use Linux VMs when developing in Mac OS.

And so are developers on Linux. 99.5% of your backend stuff will run just fine on macOS without any modification, but it's been a good practice for a long time now to run stuff in containers (Docker/OrbStack/podman/etc.) in order to have a reproducible environment free of contamination. My development process in macOS is basically no different than it was on Linux.