[Aeolun]

On the other hand, without continuous deployment, my experience is that a deployment to live always goes wrong, meaning you have to budget an entire night for one deployment, and hope you’ll fix all the issues before next morning.

[jbmsf]

As always, it depends.

I've seen staged releases work quite well at multiple companies and fail miserably at some others.

That said, continuous deployment is the right choice in many/most contexts. I'd just prefer that people see it as a choice instead of assuming that it's the only way that can work.