It obviously depends on the environment, but if I am supposed to develop tools that, in theory, can fuck up everything, then I also need access to everything (on my machine). There's no point in testing, if the elevated access rights on the server suddenly surface a fuckton of extra bugs.

Heck, I need admin just for the basics of installing developer tools and opening web ports.

They tried to lock our stuff down once. After a couple of days of absolutely zero work being done because all our tooling was missing, and the poor IT guy had to somehow learn how to install every tool we needed and taking forever, we just got sudo rights.