I have rarely found that they need admin rights on a day to day basis unless the tool is badly designed. I have one software delivery platform that requires full admin rights, it cannot write just to the user configuration!
However developers are very good at presenting it otherwise. Myself, I have run into issues where admin rights were needed, again always because of some poor installer. USB has been blocked as well and you can guess it, cannot do their work.
If they need admin rights all the time then put those particular machines on a protected network and not allow any other business work to occur there.
I think it really depends on what kind of development you are doing. I worked at an IC company, and among other things we developed (and tested) USB drivers for our devices. We installed them on literally hundreds of windows machines for testing before they were signed/ whql approved. This happen all the time. So really no way do our jobs without admin passwords. We did have the machine on isolated networks, but even on the regular networks many of the team member frequently would need to hand install drivers. This is just one of many examples. If you do anything even remotely hardware related, it can really be a totally different problem. We had IT installed USB filter drivers (we were not told about for security reasons) that actually broke a lot of testing in our labs and it took us months to figure out.
On Windows you often can't even predict if you need admin rights for something. I have had plenty of cases when I tried something and couldn't get the f...ing thing to work. Then try with admin and suddenly it works.
However developers are very good at presenting it otherwise. Myself, I have run into issues where admin rights were needed, again always because of some poor installer. USB has been blocked as well and you can guess it, cannot do their work.
If they need admin rights all the time then put those particular machines on a protected network and not allow any other business work to occur there.