No code changes pushed to production is what I've experienced in such places as a risk mitigation strategy, not that everyone is sitting around twiddling thumbs

No code changes pushed to production is what I've experienced in such places as a risk mitigation strategy, not that everyone is sitting around twiddling thumbs. Every hour of downtime between Black Friday and Christmas will cost a lot of revenue, and sometimes the company will be working with a skeleton crew for a huge chunk of that time,which makes fixes take longer as a bonus. So why risk it?