what was the company's reasoning to disable access to the developer tools on Chrome and FF? why?

I don't have the precise wording to hand but it was along the lines of "security, protecting assets, etc, etc"

My company does this too. Try installing Firefox in a nonstandard location, that fixed it for me. Now I enjoy regex search, unlock origin and tampermonkey and have little more peace of mind.

>regex search

Meaning search over within browser window i.e. “Find in Page”?

No. Find in page is dumb text match. I use an extension that let's me construct full regular expressions to search through the page. Comes very handy from time to time.