Prod environments gets problems that never ever crops up in dev environments because the test data in those evironments are bounded by the developers imaginations.
In prod, real users regularly do unimginable things.
You write a lot of things that would be 'pointless' and 'slow' in most organizations, but you don't really see bugs any more, or spend time firefighting and context switching, which counters that slowness significantly. I find it's a really enjoyably way to build software, and I've carried on doing it despite not working in an environment where I had to now.
Compare that with devs or teams that get features out the door relatively swiftly: Sure, there is problems in production sometimes, but mostly fixed pretty fast too. A dev team like that looks like heroes.
My management trusts me, mainly because the app I look after has far fewer reported defects and incidents than the rest of the company. I still haven't managed to persuade other teams to join me yet though. There's significant fear.