Architects routinely visit job sites. Of we continue to twist this analogy, staging would be the construction site and the finished building would be prod. Developers never need access to prod.
It’s also worth noting that if you’ve got enterprise customers, and you’re shipping “on prem” to them, your company might not even be able to access “prod.” You need to get the devops to a point of maturity that you can hand the whole stack over to an engineer at the customer company and have them take it from there.