Same, my time at a F100 ecommerce retailer showed me the same. Every change control board justification needed an explicit back-out/restoration plan with exact steps to be taken, what was being monitored to ensure that was being held to, contacts of prominent groups anticipated to have an effect, emergency numbers/rooms for quick conferences if in fact something did happen.
The process was pretty tight, almost no revenue-affecting outages from what I can remember because it was such a collaborative effort (even though the board presentation seemed a bit spiky and confrontational at the time, everyone was working together).
This sounds just as bad as yolo-merges, just on the other end of the spectrum.
And you moved at a glacial pace compared to Cloudflare. There are tradeoffs.