I want to be able to use Airflow-native commands like backfill, etc.
Yes!
If you’re an Enterprise customer, you can do so freely. Check out this guide.
If you’re an Astronomer Cloud customer, you can run Airflow commands directly through the Astronomer CLI by wrapping them around docker commands, but due to security concerns related to Cloud’s multi-tenant architecture, you’ll only be able to do so on your local dev environment.
There’s a section with some guidelines in our CLI Getting Started Guide.