When each commit (or each RC etc) has automated regression testing for output quality, performance, or XYZ metric critical for your business, the artifacts/reports from those code changes can be stored and audited when unexpected things happen during a release crunch.
We’ve had teams that shrugged off integrating with our CI tools, then a ”final” manual quality check on their release builds’ output showed significant regressions in completeness/accuracy. They scramble all their troops to run through the merged commits to find the culprit(s), and jeopardize delivery.
A basic CI setup could have posted perf/recall/whatever stats to their PR thread for each merged change, or better yet block the merge at some threshold for regressed metrics.
I definitely had the same view initially of CI, similar to unit test suites or verbose structured logging… things I viewed as complete overkill. What I learned was that these things DO still feel like overkill until the moment you really need the ability to reliably audit how each change affects an evolving large system
This has a lot in common with old IBM batch processing essentially designed to consume rented resources.
More user friendly dev tools are the way to get people to do these things.
Guess what — they will hire a programmer to do it anyway. They just can't be arsed as long as there is a warm body to boss around that will do it for them. It also strokes their egos, so why roll up the sleeves?
Same pipe dream as low code/no code tools enabling executives to create workflows on their own, which never happens in real life — it's "I had Kevin do it for me" all the time, every time, where "Kevin" is usually a programmer.
Same pipe dream as imagining everyone contributing to the in-house tools they are using and "collaborating". It just never happens. Everyone is happy to dump their feature request onto Andy who developed them in the first place and whine if the Andy is taking too long to implement them.
No amount of added eye candy and wishful thinking is going to change this. Even discovering Santa mating with Nessie is more likely.