[mhitza]

> But it should still be possible to deploy without CI,

Solo? Yes. In a team? Less often just because you might have credentials stored in secrets that are not shared with the entire team for security reasons.

In larger corps it's easier to wait it out that go through the trouble of escalating permission requests.

But I do get your point. Personally for deployments I have Ansible playbooks that are invoked via straighforward calls which can be done locally.