It's a good idea to never run hand-crafted data mutating queries against a production DB. Nervousness is fine but CTEs are extremely useful - at our company we

It's a good idea to never run hand-crafted data mutating queries against a production DB. Nervousness is fine but CTEs are extremely useful - at our company we insist on automated tests around SQL that will be run against the prod DB and that makes me quite happy. Just make sure the devs prove their CTE is correct before letting it touch the data.