I don't think continuous deployment necessitates deploying to production at the end. I worked at a startup that used continuous deployment to deploy to staging

I don't think continuous deployment necessitates deploying to production at the end. I worked at a startup that used continuous deployment to deploy to staging, then used push deployment to QA and to producion. This worked really well with the mostly-outsourced dev and QA teams. It gave rapid and concrete feedback to those teams, but left high risk operations in the hands of the dev lead and ops.