I have zero trust in any company that deploys directly from a developer's laptop to production, not in the least starting with how much do you trust that developer. There has to be some process right?
Laptop --> pull request + CI --> merge + CI + CD --> production
I don't think folks are pushing code directly via Git or SFTP.
Luckily, there's no sign of doing that here. There's no mention of how their CI/CD works, probably because it's out of scope for an already long article, but that's clearly happening.
Maybe my reading skills have completely vanished but to me, this exactly says they deploy directly from their developers' laptops to production. Those are literally the words used. The rest of the article goes on to defend not having a pre production environment.
They literally detail how they deploy from their laptops to production with no other environments and make arguments for why that's a good thing.