They should be identical except for any debug tools. In fact they should ideally share the exact same root filesystem bit-for-bit, but then you can overlay mount debug tools in place in a dev/staging instance when required.

E.g. if you are running an immutable k8s runtime distro like TalosOS or Metropolis, you can choose to pull and mount a debug container with strace and gdb into the same process namespace of a problem pod, and when you are done all those debugging tools evaporate.

System mutability is why most bugs happen in the first place.

There should be no tools or services in prod except those required to run or monitor prod at runtime.