we had this wonderful thing in PHP where you would just save a .php file and bada bing it was LIVE.
what happened? :D
what happened? :D
In serious emergencies I even sometimes end up quickly SSH-en to a prod server and changing the file directly. Which is kind of horrifying but hey customer is happy it got fixed immediately and I get to relax and take my time to write a proper fix. Beats sweating and watching the pipeline build and asking around for people to approve my merge request.
That and have an identical test server. I used to make changes locally, test it locally, then make the same change on test, have someone else look at it, get a lgtm, and do the same thing on the production machine. It sounds like a lot of steps but it is pretty straightforward.
Sadly, it probably doesn't work with bigger teams or more complicated projects.
The big question is what everyone else should be doing that survives the touch with unevenly distributed amounts of technical expertise and amount fucks given about result.