Someone has to have the keys to the kingdom. Ideally, multiple people do - bus factor.
If no one can bring production down this is also a problem. If only one person can, better hope they don't get hit by a bus, or take a vacation, or rage quit.
If no one can bring production down this is also a problem. If only one person can, better hope they don't get hit by a bus, or take a vacation, or rage quit.
Was that code merged without any review? If so, that is a recipe for disaster. Why no unit tests, integration tests, QA? What was the speed at which the outage was resolved? If a sane deployment strategy is in place, I'd hope that no big damage was actually done; if the error budget was burning fast, there should be some manual/automatic rollback.
tl;dr they may have been a key factor in the outage, but it seems like it is a symptom of a deeper hole in the process.