You could easily argue the opposite as well. Developers don't need an IDE, a SQL server, an HTTP server, etc running on their device at all. The choice is to use a bloated IDE that most people only use a small fraction of the features for. The servers could all run on a dev server and compile/test cycles can be done on similar servers.
Mind you I don't necessarily agree with all of this. Well except the IDE part, Vim and Emacs are tools that more people need to learn.
> The servers could all run on a dev server and compile/test cycles can be done on similar servers.
In every case I've had a dev db running on a shared test server, that DB has been woefully underspecced for the purpose and often in a datacenter with 300ms latency from the office over the company VPN.
While production instances are in the same datacenter as the production DB with 5ms latency.
Mind you I don't necessarily agree with all of this. Well except the IDE part, Vim and Emacs are tools that more people need to learn.