Interesting. I get 256 on Catalina (0-255), as opposed to 4 (0-3) on Mojave. /dev doesn't appear to be dynamic as it is on Linux, so they've chosen to pre-create more device files. More importantly, on Catalina the permissions are now ug=rw (0660) and with a group name of "access_bpf", whereas on Mojave they were u=rw (0600) and "wheel".

So, yeah, looks like Catalina was a stepping stone.