This observation is profound, and also resonates with my experiences across different companies, some of which had highly mission critical / reliable systems.
I used to imagine from the outside that such places must have highly elaborate testing regimes, backup systems, and genius-level developers. However, my lived experience is that they're just really good / disciplined about reverting to the previous known good state and backtracking. Much like a source control system lets you undo a bad change and go back to a known good solution, they do that with their releases and entire system.
Some anti-patterns are "roll-forward" with a fix for a problem (if you failed to reason about the original change with the problem properly, how can you be confident that your "roll-forward" / hotfix / patch will work? Roll it back, try again in dev, roll forward again.
This also means avoiding changes that can't be rolled back (because they wrote data in a new format that the previous version doesn't understand) wherever possible (and it usually is).
Different domains, too: it comes up frequently in my - admittedly limited - experience with woodworking: _"Don't cut it 'til you need to cut it!"_.
There are some one-way doors (cutting a long piece of timber), or doors that inflict a big cost if you back-track through them (gluing a precisely cut joint), and you're well served by minimizing them and planning your operations to make sure those ones safe.
So, you 'sneak up' on a cut line incrementally rather than cut directly to it, allowing you to check fit as you go and ensure your final, precise cut is removing not a big, clumsy chunk but a tiny controllable shaving.
I used to imagine from the outside that such places must have highly elaborate testing regimes, backup systems, and genius-level developers. However, my lived experience is that they're just really good / disciplined about reverting to the previous known good state and backtracking. Much like a source control system lets you undo a bad change and go back to a known good solution, they do that with their releases and entire system.
Some anti-patterns are "roll-forward" with a fix for a problem (if you failed to reason about the original change with the problem properly, how can you be confident that your "roll-forward" / hotfix / patch will work? Roll it back, try again in dev, roll forward again.
This also means avoiding changes that can't be rolled back (because they wrote data in a new format that the previous version doesn't understand) wherever possible (and it usually is).