His point is that Ops time is more expensive than Dev time, they get paid more. The Dev teams should really fix their own bugs if they happen in the wee-small-hours.
If you're separated out from ops, what would ever drill that into you? Saying you're too busy for ops is just wild to me. That's some of the highest effort to reward work someone can do.
> waste my already precious *freetime* on fixing bugs in prod
It doesn't mean bugs cannot be raised, planned and addressed through the normal development process.
Also, abundance of bugs in production could indicate cutting costs on testing.