How do you recommend dev envs be treated when the company wants it to mimic prod but you still want to save money compared to prod?
The most important thing tends to be to make it possible to run services in isolation so devs can test individual services on their own machines. Then you'll end up with much more time-limited need to spin up larger environments for integration tests etc.
The most important part, though, tends to be to ensure you have a system to keep track of what is running and who is currently using it.