Staging has always been about QA before deployment in production. For tools you buy, one might just end up forgoing staging where you know it must work. Though,

Staging has always been about QA before deployment in production. For tools you buy, one might just end up forgoing staging where you know it must work. Though, what to do if an update bricks the system? For any non-trivial and complex software, you still end up with having at least one test-environment though. Feature flags is about multiple branching. Staging doesn't really give you that in full, just by hacking the environment. It's then that you end up with environments that don't properly reflect future production and start missing stuff. The author sounds like someone familiar with testing, that needs to learn about CI/CD. Sure, for trivial front end stuff, you can often get away with doing it in production. But without synchronization between environments, you end up in trouble and take on more risk, just for the luxury of treating your paying customers as beta-testers. It's a valid opinion depending on what one is working on, but I bet it doesn't apply for most outside unimportant side-projects.