When I switch my Magento 2 to developer mode it doesn’t do much for me. I practically don’t see any benefit from it. When I change something in my plugin it has no effect on the front end. If I change something in JS or HTML it doesn’t change it in real time.
Only games I call full cleanup commands:
php bin/magento setup:upgrade && php bin/magento setup:di:compile && php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f && php bin/magento cache:flush
That’s just to see the changes. And these commands take quite a long time about 5 min to load which drives me crazy.