Sure, there are some overbearing procedure monkeys who really want a process on everything, but a lot of "protection" rules are there because something really bad (and expensive, financially or reputationally) has happened before.
Having something not work during the development cycle is annoying for one person or a team. Having something break in production usually means people get paged and (depending on what you do) the resulting issues can have major societal aswell as economic impact.
In the ops world, this is especially visible if you go further down the stack. (from applications down the the network).
Network architecture moves at a toad's pace compared to webdevelopment, which is a good thing considering breaking the network will usually break every other system inside a IT department/landscape.
It only takes a few instances of people royally messing stuff up in production for their deployment rights to be stripped away – and other groups catch the fallout too, as new "procedures" get implemented.