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Far too many people on HN seem to think the public facing code that we see is all that the engineering team in a large company works on. There's so much more to running a large SaaS business. If Slack is like all the other SaaS companies I've encountered they'll have dozens of internal apps for sales, comms, analytics, engineering, etc that they work on that people outside of the business never see[1]. Those all need developing and all need deploying.

[1] They might buy in solutions for some business functions like accounting, HR and support, but they'll still have tons of homegrown stuff. Every tech company does.

Lots of places do a lot of deploys but hide significant new features behind A/B testing and feature flags. So the two things are disconnected from each other.

User visible changes are dependent on the product development process rather than the rate of deploys. Whether you deploy 12 times a day or once a month, it's not like code is getting written any faster.