I'm sure there are clueless companies/managers that don't quite get it in infra land (and that are still great places/people to work for and products to work on

I'm sure there are clueless companies/managers that don't quite get it in infra land (and that are still great places/people to work for and products to work on) and if you find yourself in one of those situations, it's pretty rational to need prod if it's the only instance of your problem because of large divergences in the things you and the article mention. You're not wrong. But something that I've been a stickler on since our company's beginnings is that dev is really, as much as is feasible and useful, an exact copy of prod. And it's working so far. We have yet to scale to massive heights, I'll admit that. But it's a principle that I've seen more than a few companies simply neglect.