devDependencies and dependencies, with a little explanation, is really how you categorize packages your project needs. Dependencies will be installed in production, while devDependencies won't.
Dependencies, as you might guess, are the packages your program needs to run. In a web app that would be React and Express (or whatever framework you're using). They would be automatically installed whenever your package is installed, or whenever your app is deployed to a server. Your app does not run without its dependencies.
When you are watching status badges for these two types of dependency you are in some sense monitoring different kinds of risk, because (unless your site/application just happens to rely on some transitive dependencies with known security vulnerabilities) an out-of-date test runner or bundler is unlikely to cause problems for your users. But if an actual dependency is out of date you should expect issues to happen.
Those little "status" badges (usually like shields.io or similar) in GitHub repos are just checking your dependencies status (passing/up to date/etc). There are a bunch of services, like David DM or Snyk or Dependabot, which just scan your package.json and check to see if the version of a dependency is still the latest published one, or if you have some old one that has known security vulnerabilities—)
You may have noticed some developers are quite strict about keeping everything green but I'd argue they are missing the point a bit. This status tracking isn't just important to make sure your local dev environment keeps working correctly (although devDependencies being a few versions behind isn't ideal, it's not usually the end of the world). Keeping track of devDependencies is important to make sure everything you depend on for your local development workflow is known and not out of your control in some sense (more on this in a bit).
Let's talk about some weird corner cases here. As I mentioned above build tools and bundlers are supposed to live in your devDependencies but they are also pieces of software that can still break your day if there is a bad release. Imagine your webpack or Rollup config suddenly starts failing because of a bug in the latest version and you have no way to opt out. "Dev" doesn't imply these packages are "unimportant" it just means "isolated to your development/build pipeline". A broken Babel version in devDependencies won't cause errors in production but it will prevent you from actually deploying any new code which is arguably worse.
Lock files (package-lock.json or yarn.lock) are intended to help with this by locking the dependencies to the exact same version numbers across machines, but let's be honest here, people still experience this quite a bit. Especially in teams where some developers remember to commit their lock files, but others don't. You get those classic "but it works on my machine" moments where it's an actual workstream to debug across 3 time zones.
Of course devDependencies can also have security vulnerabilities. Think about cases where testing frameworks or other dependencies were tampered with to steal credentials from developers' computers. It's not a common attack vector but there are some documented examples of these kinds of attacks and the whole "supply chain compromise" thing is real enough that you can't just ignore devDependencies being out of date.
It also matters if you're bundling for browser apps. A single mis-categorized package in the wrong section can mean your users downloading Babel's entire collection of polyfills just to view your landing page. Webpack and other bundlers try to tree-shake those things out (ideally) but they're not magic, garbage in garbage out. Bundles have exploded to stupid sizes for me just because a heavy library got mis-categorized as a regular dependency when it only ran at build time.
devDependency status badges are basically an eggo thing in the open source world? Projects that keep their devDependencies up to date are in some sense signaling that they are being actively maintained, even if their core codebase is quite old/stagnant. It's a heuristic that (incorrectly) indicates the project maintainers are still paying attention and probably willing to respond to new issues. Super shallow metric but people definitely notice a green badge with the last commit 2 years ago.
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