Good point. The current security model of desktop OSs sucks. I was recently reminded of this by an issue at work. I'm used to devs having admin rights on their laptops, but here they closed that down: you have to request admin rights for a specific purpose, and then you get them for a week.
I recently requested those rights again because I needed to install something new for a PoC I was working on, and that wasn't allowed anymore. But during onboarding I had those rights and installed homebrew to more easily install dev tools, and homebrew keeps its admin rights to install stuff in a directory owned by admin. So that circumvents this whole security model (and I did, for my PoC).
The problem is that it's all or nothing. Homebrew should have the right only to install in a specific directory. Apps shouldn't automatically get access to potentially sensitive data. Mobile OSs handle that sort of thing more granularly. Desktop OSs should too.
Because the overly restrictive security rules at my work are little more than security theatre when it's so easy to circumvent.
It's not theater, your IT department just isn't implementing it correctly. I recently switched jobs and gave up one macbook pro for another (work issued).
Company A gave me sudo access and I could do anything I wanted.
Company B locks down everything, no sudo, no brew, nothing. But I do get a big VM with root to do anything I want. There is an approved "appstore" of many different varieties of IDEs/tools.
TLDR: Not having brew is not a problem, and /can be/ a better experience if done right.
It took a couple weeks to shift the mental model but I have no problems. The dev experience is quite good because they provide all the libraries you need to do your job.
There is software that does exactly that. You install a software kiosk were users can pick from and users don't get admin rights.
Won't satisfy developers for long though because it cannot work.
The problem is that mobile OS security systems isn't fit to develop anything but shit. It is simply no solution for desktop.