As with the vast majority of game design questions, the answer is "It depends". Imagine a game like Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. There are a significant number of items in the game and each one does something completely different. Each item has a specific ability, animations, effects, etc. associated with it, each would take a significantly longer amount of time to develop than a chestplate in World of Warcraft that gives +150 stamina and Strength.

The general rule is that the more that an item/ability/feature/etc. does, the longer it takes to build that item/ability/feature/etc. In a game where we expect players to go through lots of items, then we need to make lots of items for them to play with. Since we have a finite total amount of development time to spend, we need to spend relatively small amounts of time the average item we create. Not all items are created equal, either - we can churn out a bunch of the vendor trash items that players will use until something better comes along very quickly, and we reserve more of our dev time for the subset of "interesting" items like the ones that have special procs or abilities or whatever.

Design has some input on art for items but not a lot. The amount of time it takes to build art and VFX is significant, so item designers and artists are often given the same broad strokes for a batch of items (e.g. "This is a water dungeon, so think general water themes for your cool items") and we each do our work in parallel. Most of the time it works out, but sometimes we end up with some wires crossed at the end.

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