I never really had issues with the immediate changes in WordPress, but that was also before I had a professional job and was dealing with WordPress as more than just a hobby or pet website. It's fairly nerve wracking sometimes just to update plugins or test out minor appearance tweaks. I should probably look into building an actual staging environment like the article suggests.

They do have change tracking and scheduled posting (essentially staging) for content, though. But if you're actually building the site, they assume you either don't care or are going to manage the process is some other way of your own devising.

"They assume" is probably too much credit IMO. It was the mid-2000s, no one knew what they were doing, least of all the WP core team (the security holes show that), so they made a product with a design that no longer make sense, but it's hard to evolve away from.