Different companies do it differently, but I'm not aware of any that make it absolutely impossible to get at production data (that hasn't been encrypted with a key they don't have) and program instances, just some make one (reasonably) jump through many more hoops than others. It's very much a double-edged sword so access control, auditing, etc. needs to be done carefully. (Privacy By Design.) The value can be immense -- e.g. debugging and hotloading a patch on a spacecraft 100 million miles away (http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html)
My team both develops and supports the applications that we build in production. When issues are reported, it's often necessary to check the database to resolve it. Being able to check what data the application is pulling during requests is very useful for troubleshooting.
Programming is not my day job, so please correct me if I'm wrong - but every project I was involved in so far - having access to a production DB is a big no no.
Or does the project you refered to not contain any sensitive data, so having direct access to the production system is deemed 'safe'?