Most smaller teams usually don’t prioritize physical access — they usually only need it for one-off events. While this would be a one-off event, it would be one that affects many servers.
That is really not my experience at all. Every professional smaller team I worked with "usually" had this figured out and set up.
In times of home office, no one wants to be at the office for just pressing a single button on some server.
My experiences for ops is all pre-2012 and with teams numbering less than 3 for the whole org. So I’m sure things have changed or gotten cheaper? I can’t see a team of 3-4 having the budget to get something that allows them to be “lazy”, especially when that budget can go towards something useful. But I guess the pandemic probably changed things there?
Serial connections will only cost you a Raspberry Pi (there's probably some really cheap console servers on eBay too).
I don't think the issue is so much cost but more this kind of systems administration is becoming a forgotten art because 99% of the time modern tooling removes the need for it. So younger sysadmins are never taught how to do these kinds things. However when I started out, I worked in a few small companies that had their physical hosts connected to a console server (which was a Cisco device like a network switch) via serial cables and you'd then connect to that console server remotely.
If you can afford to have something down for an extended period then fine. But even with a small team some services are built such that certain device outages cannot be tolerated, at least for an extended period.
So out-of-band/console servers or whatever still make a lot of sense and a relatively high priority.
Most smaller teams usually don’t prioritize physical access — they usually only need it for one-off events. While this would be a one-off event, it would be one that affects many servers.