One will cost and another might, see the difference

Time to deploy is a known value. The impact potential of having a workflow where ssh'ing into production is even possible can cost you buckets as: 1. You're messing with production, obviously. 2. Your infrastructure isn't stateless. 3. Your infrastructure is likely not HA. 4. You likely don't have canaries in place to mitigate the impact of bad production deployments.

And the impact of all of these on direct revenue/productivity can be immense. SSH into prod is a crutch.

They are both a might. Both are a probability distribution.

In the long run "fucking with production" as well <i>will</i> cost a fortune.

Citation needed. I’ve “fucked” with many prod systems over the last 15 years and not caused outages, or extended them.