How many of the failures caught in dev would have been legitimate problems in production? How about the ones in staging?
If your environments are that different are you even testing the right things?
And if yes, if you need all of those, then why not add a couple more environments? Because more pre-prod environments means more bugs caught in those, right? /s
The whole point of a dev environment is so you can catch errors you wouldn't in production. Keeping it as close as possible to production is the point. If you're catching errors in dev, you'll see them in production
More environments don't catch more bugs. What is this corollary? More testing catches more bugs. A dev environment allows free integration testing without act users of production being affected
In their perception, is the rest of tech industry gambling in every pull request that some untested code would work in production?
I work at a large company. We extensively test code on local machines. Then dev test environments. Then small roll out to just a few data centers in prod bed. Run small scale online flight experiments. Then roll out to the rest of prod bed.
And I've seen code fail in each of the stages, no matter how extensively we tested and robustly code ran in prior stages.