Developers have something superior to a checklist much of the time, automation. Deployment should be fully automated, no checklist necessary. But yes on non-automatable things like code review, a checklist is certainly a plus.
Not all parts of a deployment can be automated in every case.
I've helped craft a checklist we use on our releases based on lessons learned over several years, an awful lot of it is about communication to end users / other teams. Especially if the release is one that involves downtime it's important to have consistent practices and clarity about who is going communicate what and when. Checklists are a good way to capture the "what could have gone better" outputs of retrospectives.
