This makes sense. With a high-enough release velocity to trunk, a super safe release pipeline with lots of automated checks, a well-tested rolling update/rollback process in production, and aggressive observability, it is totally possible to remove staging in many environments. This is one of the popular talking points touted by advocates of trunk-based development.
(Note that you can do a lot of exploratory testing in disposable environments that get spun up during CI. Since the code in prod is the same as the code in main, there's no reason to keep them around. That's probably how they get around what's traditionally called UAT.)
The problem for larger companies that tend to have lots of staging environments is that the risk of testing in production vastly exceeds the benefits gained from this approach. Between the learning curve required to make this happen, the investment required to get people off of dev, the significantly larger amounts of money at stake, and, in many cases, stockholder responsibilities, it is an uphill battle to get companies to this point.
Also, many (MANY) development teams at BigCo's don't even "own" their code once it leaves staging.
I've found it easier to employ a more grassroots approach towards moving people towards laptop-to-production. Every dev wants to work like Squeaky does (many hate dev/staging environments for the reasons they've outlined); they just don't feel empowered to do so. Work with a single team that ships something important but won't blow up the company if they push a bad build into prod. Let them be advocates internally to promote (hopefully) pseudo-viral spread.
(Note that you can do a lot of exploratory testing in disposable environments that get spun up during CI. Since the code in prod is the same as the code in main, there's no reason to keep them around. That's probably how they get around what's traditionally called UAT.)
The problem for larger companies that tend to have lots of staging environments is that the risk of testing in production vastly exceeds the benefits gained from this approach. Between the learning curve required to make this happen, the investment required to get people off of dev, the significantly larger amounts of money at stake, and, in many cases, stockholder responsibilities, it is an uphill battle to get companies to this point.
Also, many (MANY) development teams at BigCo's don't even "own" their code once it leaves staging.
I've found it easier to employ a more grassroots approach towards moving people towards laptop-to-production. Every dev wants to work like Squeaky does (many hate dev/staging environments for the reasons they've outlined); they just don't feel empowered to do so. Work with a single team that ships something important but won't blow up the company if they push a bad build into prod. Let them be advocates internally to promote (hopefully) pseudo-viral spread.