Using terraform in a cooperate environment

I am wondering how different companies go about testing terraform and infrastructure changes, specifically aws.

For example, a policy change which needs to be done to all tenants to allow a app feature to work.We would have a tsting environment that we would deploy terraform to, then deploy the changes on top and confirm it is working or do changes as needed.

The problem with this, its a large setup -rds -dynamo -cognito then add user data then test it is working.This feels slow and cumbersome and not really scalable if you had multiple teams that needed to do this.How do other places do this?

Is there a sandbox maybe that people use?

I guess I am looking for a better system and best practices around this.