A skilled operator reading a runbook would seem less likely to exacerbate the mess than a naively written script. The operator can think, "wait a minute, this isn't right." Maybe they won't when they're sleeping off a night of drinking at 3am, but they could. The Python interpreter can't.

To make the script less naive, you'd need a development environment with the same infrastructure components as production, and the freedom to make them fail so you can develop your script against their failure states.