But there's nothing stopping you from loading realistic (or even real) data into a system like this. They're entirely different concepts. Indeed, I've loaded gigabytes of production data into systems similar to what I'm proposing here (taking all necessary precautions of course). At one company, I even built a system that pulled production into a developer-friendly snapshot while simultaneously pseudo-anonymising that data so it can be safely (for some value of ${safe}) be tinkered with in development.

In fact, adhering to a system like this makes such things easier, since you don't have to make any concessions to "this is how we do it in development". You just pull a snapshot from the environment you want to work with and load it into your Compose session.