OP never mentioned it was a production server. Also, sometimes, things get stuck, or you haven’t set up a pipeline to gather X data but y has happened, or there’s a deadlock in your source control host, or you’ve accidentally deleted the backup and the live service is the only copy of the data... all awful reasons and yet I’m sure they happen every day to people.

I didn't say you should never ssh into an instance, I just said you should ask yourself why you're doing it first. Every one of the reasons you listed is a great thing to be cognizant of so that you can make a list/ticket/whatever to fix that problem so you won't need to ssh again to solve that problem.