I'm I the only idiot who would back up the files and make the change, and thinks that the hero contractor's wrong here? Version control is nice, but it's not a prerequisite to shipping, and not using one isn't "extremely dangerous and irresponsible" unless you're working on control systems at a nuclear power plant.

Maybe you shouldn't make the change until you have a Selenium suite, automated rollback, blue/green deployments, a bulletproof status page, and an on-call rotation with a regularly tested runbook. Maybe we should just sit on our hands and make internal improvements until things are perfect.