It sounds like a project structure issue where local environment config that shouldn't be tracked is (or a lack of optional additional config that could be specified locally). Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the sort of change you're talking about.
I generally try to have support for this in the application, using a `.local` config file override which is in .gitignore. If one person has this trouble, chances are the rest of the team does too, and making this change is usually less time than the team collectively spends messing with it in a week.
Sometimes there's an existing workflow everyone just accepts (project in a specific path; some dependency manually installed locally; specific HOSTS alias to the database server IP; etc) but so long as you don't break that while also making it better/easier, I've found it's usually accepted.
