At a previous employer, there was a basically full-time team member (contractor like me, but long-term presence so it didn't matter much) working with configuration management. It was basically his job to keep the development environment working, and kept reasonably up to date.

That was done using VM images that he owned and maintained, which was not optimal for me, but there was also documentation laying out the steps needed to create the environment so it was possible to maintain a bare-metal clone of the official environment and use that. Good times!