Maybe, I don't feel particularly strongly either way about if it can be applied to the kind of large services you are thinking of. But also wasn't really the point of my comment, I merely rejected the claim that acceptance testing in fields where it is done is the same as testing in prod.
Perhaps the closest analogy would be deploying to a limited subset of users on closely monitored boxes.
It's clearly not perfect though, except perhaps if the test aircraft turned itself into a crater on the runway, there is very little one aircraft can do to effect the function of all others.
In software it's hard to get this kind of guarantee, a new delete with a missing where clause in your canary environment is going to take some time to clean up after (assuming you have backups etc).
