of course you can do dev work without desktop environments! That's just living in the terminal all day! 🤣 (I use tmux, vim personally).
There's even fancy things with terminal text-editors like neovim where you can even add Copilot features to it.
If you need to be opening a browser frequently and/or enjoy using a mouse with your IDEs than maybe a desktop environment is better for you
if you're separating out between the "machine" that runs your services from the "machine" that builds the software just be sure to keep your packages in lockstep working between them, keep a note of any that don't line up. Debian might have outdated packages against the newest versions of Ubuntu (cant think of any off the top of my head); no big deal because both are debian-based anyways
