Disclaimer: I worked for a major feature flagging company, but these opinions are my own. This article makes a lot of valid points regarding staging environmen

Disclaimer: I worked for a major feature flagging company, but these opinions are my own. This article makes a lot of valid points regarding staging environments, but their reasoning to not use them is dubious. None of their reasons are good enough to take staging environments out of the equation. I'd be willing to be that the likelihood of anyone merging code that isn't ready to go live is close to zero. You still need to validate the code. Their branching strategy is (in my opinion) the ideal branching strategy, but again, that isn't good enough to take staging away. Using feature flags is probably the only reason they give that comes to close to being okay with getting rid of staging, but even then, you can't always be sure that the code you've built works as expected. So you still need a staging environment to validate some things. Having hands-on deployments should always be happening anyway. It's not a reason to not have a staging environment. If you truly want to get rid of your a staging environment the minimum that you need to feature flagging of _everything_, and I do mean everything. That is honestly near impossible. You also need live preview environments for each PR/branch. This somewhat eliminates the need for a staging because reviewers can test the changes on a live environment. These two things still aren't good enough reason to get rid of your staging environment. There is still many things that can go wrong. The reason we have layered deployment systems (CI, staging etc) is to increase confidence that your deployment will be good. You can never be 100% sure. But I'll bet you, removing a staging environment lowers that confidence further. Having said all of this, if it works for you, then great. But the reasons I've read on this post, don't feel good enough to me to get rid of any staging environments.