Missing linker error in photon cli compilation?

Troubleshooting
1

I recently introduced a crash in a multiple-file project:

in file1:
MyClass myInstance;

in file2:
extern MyClass &myInstance;

This resulted in flashing red error #1 when accessing myInstance from file2.

Fortunately, someone smarter than me pointed out my code mistake, but I thought this should have resulted in a link error instead of a .bin.
I’m considering moving to a local build instead of the cloud-compile. Am I going to catch more errors in a local build than cloud-compile?

I’m using the CLI to cloud-compile for a photon on firmware 0.5.3.