“ If any engineer on your team can merge a set of changes to main, secure in the knowledge that 15 minutes later their changes will have been tested and deployed to production, with no human gates or manual intervention required, then congratulations! You’re doing CI/CD.”

We absolutely do this and I don’t think we are THAT unusual.

Also, as you hit larger scale it’s questionable whether this is still a good idea. We are about 50 engineers and our CD means we release to production about 10 times a day, on average. At that pace, some tricky things start to happen: a metric starts to move sideways and it’s hard to actually correlate it to a release - you may have to roll back across multiple releases, which can create a fairly confusing situation for the team.