Sounds like real innovation toward actual continuous integration and continuous deployment! Indisputably better for the typical DORA DevOps metrics, the trick being relying on other quality controls and not treating code review as a quality control for regressions outside of feature flags.
We operated this way back in the day building Canv.as and DrawQuest but without the snapshotting, that's a nice development
Wish more teams would explore this type of development. Everyone is stuck in the git kernel dev model practices. It probably sounds weird because it's unusual, not because it's a DevOps bad practice (it's quite on the leading edge).