I work at a company where our production system WAS like this for a LOOONG time. No development environment, no tests, no documentation, QA was the end users, etc...

I have done a lot of work to improve the CI/CD, get them a development environment, teach some best-practices, get testing set up, reduce bus factor, all the modernization stuff. Oh, and get them a version control system (that helped a bit).

But man, what a rush it was when the system would go down at 11PM on a Sunday, I got to RDP onto the production machine and modify the production code ON THE MACHINE with a one-line fix and... CTRL+S was the production deployment strategy.

I watched one outage occur in real time when a coworker was showing me something on the production machine and CLICK+DRAGGED a live application directory into another one by mistake. Another outage occurred because someone stupid (me) destroyed the inetpub folder (all the IIS configurations for 95 applications). Cold sweats for an hour at 3AM thinking "this one is reallllly bad" before finding the backup.

I always imagined the tech team as these scrappy fellas running this extremely complex steampunk Rube Goldberg machine that was about to blow... I walked in and they just handed me a nailgun and said "GET TO WORK THIS OL' GAL IS ABOUT TO RUN OFF THE RAILS".

It was the wild west and part of me really misses that (not enough to go back though).