Unfortunately these sort of mistakes are seen as a "right of passage" for many developers. I ran "`DELETE FROM users;` without a WHERE clause against production in my first year on the job. I felt absolutely terrible. I thought I was connected to a development machine.

Fortunately we had backups available.

Often this isn't a problem with the individual developer itself, but points to a problem with the organization. Frankly most developers shouldn't have access to a production database, let alone mutable access.

One major concern is loss of data, but another is privacy.

It's so frustrating to see this happening when there are tools that solve this like Snaplet (I'm a founder), and Replibyte that allow you to generate or obfuscate data for usage in dev-environments, and Neon that allows you to branch your database.