Assuming you have a DR (damage recovery) site and some sort of backup that runs nightly (RedGate for instance) then it's not 100% required to have your Devl environment equal to Prod.

Delving deeper into your question-- How large is your infrastructure ? Do you ONLY have a Devl and Prod environment ?

I run the following instances: Prod, Devl, Test, DR.

Application testing is done in test.

Devl is equal to Prod and has development done on it before moving it to Prod.

Prod is self explanatory.

DR matches Prod nightly.