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I usually upon migrating do edit /etc/hosts (in Unix cases), adding the new IP address and domain.tld to check whether everything's working as expected — before switching the nameservers or DNS entries.
You don't need to edit your /etc/hosts file for that and you can't trust it anyways because it's isolated to just your machine before your DNS servers are even used.
But you can run dig domain.tld or dig @8.8.8.8 domain.tld if you want to test it with another DNS server besides your own (such as Google's).
That ~48 hour wait period is just a safe number to make sure DNS servers around the world update their records.
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You don't need to edit your /etc/hosts file for that and you can't trust it anyways because it's isolated to just your machine before your DNS servers are even used.
But you can run
dig domain.tldordig @8.8.8.8 domain.tldif you want to test it with another DNS server besides your own (such as Google's).That ~48 hour wait period is just a safe number to make sure DNS servers around the world update their records.