It depends on the kinds of changes you mean. The kinds of local changes I have are just env variables that allow the software to run locally a little bit differently than in the production environment. I'm able to do this by using a .env file and a library for my languages of choice that read a .env file if it's there, but use defaults that make sense for prod when it's not there. Then the .env file is gitignored so it doesn't make its way over to the production environment.

Each developer can modify their .env however they want without having to make any changes visible to git.