Try running Visual Studio without admin rights and you will weep. Regarding other rights, I tried to onboard a new Dev without admin rights, however, after the 25th IT ticket (that take days to get done), I gave up.
The only exceptions are some parts of the C++ debugger and the driver development kit.
I'm not sure if your "almost ten years ago" is meant to be hyperbolic, or genuine... I can't even remember why, but I know the project I was on 6 years ago definitely needed visual studio to have admin access, and it was all standard C# app stuff (maybe WPF?)