Since then I treat any prod server terminal like I’m entering launch codes for a middle system.
Anything outside of ls or cd I’m very careful, read the command a couple times before executing, etc.
We tend to go ahead and either use a runbook, or whatever experience we might have, to setup a pretty detailed plan of what to run on which systems with which purpose. You can then throw these plans at someone else to review. Sure, it takes an hour or two more to setup a solid plan and waiting for a review takes time as well. But this has turned into a great tool to build up experience in weird parts of the infrastructure.
one of my frustrations of bigco software is people taking basically maintenance roles where the computer tells them what to do, because the lava flow legacy code base is too scary to touch.
however, you can automate your daily clean up tasks. it's certainly shellacking more mud on the ball, but if you're not going to even try scripting your repetitive tasks, then i don't know why you're a programmer.
Takes a lot of effort to stop people opening up a shell in prod or grabbing a prod DB dump or even just connecting to the prod datastore directly from their local env.