Comment by pak9rabid

Yep, a reverse-proxy is supposed to handle all the stuff that would need handling in a production environment (as you stated: TLS termination, load-balancing, DoS protection, etc) that an application developer should not have to be concerned with when doing local development. Not only is this a good de-coupling of services, but it makes the developers' jobs much easier when they don't need to be concerned with such things.