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.