Are any of these really "hot takes"?
Sadly there are many organisations out there who don't respect employee annual leave and expect their engineering team to be on-call without compensation. The usual excuses are things like "it's the holidays, it'll be quiet".
>A deploy freeze means that folks are not actively trying to make progress on a dev project that needs to be deployed. Deploy freezes need to equate to either time off, or time spent on things that do not need to be deployed when complete.
The author does a bad job explaining why. If you allow deployable work to progress without deployment during a holiday code freeze, you are just shifting, sometimes magnifying risk post-code freeze. All that undeployed work during the code freezer will increase the rate of change tremendously post-code-freeze.
There's also varying costs (not all monetary) to responding to an incident. I'm going to be very upset at my employer if I get called in on Christmas because there was a deploy going on that caused issues. First week of January, that's just expected.