You should not be logging in to production unless something has gone seriously wrong. I've not seen a company where developers (minus a handful of "blessed" staff) even know how to access prod, let alone log in.
During development you will need to login to the pod, to review settings, directory contents and so on. If the OS running in the pod does not allow you to do that - during development - then that's severely limiting.
Talos is OS running in the host. You can run in the pod whatever you need.
Also you shouldn't really use pod OS to debug it. Kubernetes supports debug containers: you launch a separate container (presumably with convenient debug environment) and mounts selected container rootfs inside, so you can inspect it as needed. It also helps, when the target container does not work and you can't just exec into it.
There's a recommendation to remove everything from the container that's not necessary for running a given program, that reduces attack surface.
You can still exec yourself into the pods. No one said you cannot.
There is no shell or ssh on the hosts for you to login to, but still if you absolutely must you can create a privileged container and mount /. Whole point is you shouldn't.
