You'd be surprised. Some corporate environments keep machines pretty locked down in terms of what you can change in the System Preferences, or install on your own.

Adding a .vimrc file doesn't require administrator privileges on either Linux or macOS, nor does it require changing anything in System Preferences.

If for some reason you "can't" add a .vimrc file to a user account then you probably shouldn't be manually logging into that user account.

Can you request the change from your IT department?

Just fill in the ticket, call to follow it up, explain what you want again, re open the closed ticket, open the ticket again, do a few ritualistic incantations and you'll get there.

I'd say it's the norm for the 'enterprise' category of development.