Just going to throw out there that I’ve never seen a dev database that was anything other than fake data, or internal dogfood data. Have worked at major public tech companies and late-stage startups.
I think one reason might be that this was never sensitive personal data. Phone numbers, emails and addresses mostly corporate. But real passwords (hashes) from real users, on 50+ laptops with unencrypted drives was pretty normals.
I think culturally there may be a difference since I'm in a place where some data (addresses, phone numbers, ...) is public info, i.e. given your name I can get your address and phone number from a public DB anyway.
I think culturally there may be a difference since I'm in a place where some data (addresses, phone numbers, ...) is public info, i.e. given your name I can get your address and phone number from a public DB anyway.