Wondering why does any developer need update/delete/drop access to a prod database? Or why would ad hoc scripts have this ability?
Which is probably why they dropped the prod db.
But I'm sure you can enlighten me with some actual research-based facts?
'Ship fast and break things' is one of the best and worst cultures in the tech industry.
You could argue that dev-ops model include automation for operations on production systems, with direct access to production systems limited to a reduced set of staff. Developers can create the change-sets to modify infrastructure, but those change sets are reviewed, validated, tested, and then executed on production via CI/CD Automation.
Infrastructure as Code, and Immutable Infrastructure lends itself well to that approach.
As part of a team (and an organization) that practices "devops" heavily, all of our devs do ops. We maintain the separation using an oncall/ops rotation and only touching prod from designated "ops" hosts. We also follow a "2 person" rule when touching production. We use a secrets management system to deliver credentials to hosts and alarming setup when the "wrong" hosts (e.g. dev hosts with access to prod creds) have access to certain creds.