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It appears to be a relic from the NeXT days.

If you look at the video [1] you can see it installing developer tools into the NeXTDeveloper and NeXTLibrary folders. So it's quite possible Apple just did a find/replace and removed the prefix.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0WsLZZVY

Earlier versions of Mac OS X would install the development tools in /Developer on the hard drive too.

Right - it was more like Utilities than Documents. A folder for a type of app that not every user needed, not for documented created for a purpose.

Compare: the Scheme language was supposed to be called Schemer, but filename length limitations back then prevailed.

As was Forth – it indended name was “Fourth”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior

Some older versions of Xcode installed themselves and SDKs and other developer tools into /Developer. All that stuff lives in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer now.

/usr is ok, so /Developer is also ok