Indeed, what is the point? If they have some separation of concerns between dev and ops then it also makes sense to give ops some separate rights and responsib

Indeed, what is the point? If they have some separation of concerns between dev and ops then it also makes sense to give ops some separate rights and responsibilities, such as vetting a change like this by analyzing the resulting query plans from a sample of production database queries. I'm sure something like that will be in their internal postmortem action items under "prevention".