No one owned up to it, but had a pretty good idea who it was.
That sounds like you're putting (some of) the blame on whoever misclicked. As opposed to everyone who has allowed this insanely dangerous situation to exist.
Not immediately calling up your boss to say "I fucked up big" is not a mistake, it is a conscious bad action.
> in the dropdown menu of the MongoDB browser, exit & drop database were next to each other
So maybe they signed off for the night without realizing anything was wrong.
As its said before: he made a mistake. The error was allowing the prod database to to be port forwarded from a non prod environment. As head of eng that was MY error. So I owned to it and we changed policies.
Nice that you were a person he felt ok with sharing the mistake with, I suppose that's an important part of being head of eng.
There are ways around it, of course, but it prevents the scenario described above.
I haven't seen this design in practice using MongoDB Atlas or Compass, but would hope for an "Are you really sure?" confirmation in an admin UI.