Using Kubernetes for development?

I'd love to hear some stories about how you or your organization is using Kubernetes for development! My team is experimenting with using it because our "platform" is getting into the territory of too large to run or manage on a single developer machine. We've previously used Docker Compose to enable starting things up locally, but that started getting complicated.

The approach we're trying now is to have a Helm chart to deploy the entire platform to a k8s namespace unique to each developer and then using Telepresence to connect a developer's laptop to the cluster and allow them to run specific services they're working on locally.

This seems to be working well, but now I'm finding myself concerned with resource utilization in the cluster as devs don't remember to uninstall or scale down their workloads when they're not active any more, leading to inflation of the cluster size.

Would love to hear some stories from others!