Is local / staging / production still industry standard?
When you say &quot;Industry Standard&quot; that's very much going to depend on what industry.
You can drop code into production however you want (legally restricted industries obviously being the exemption to this), but the question you should probably be examining is if you should be doing that.
I've recently worked on products which range from having incredibly test coverage, huge amounts of infrastructure set up to perform every imaginable regression test against any integration point that exists, and even though it was not the done thing with that particular product, after passing all of the automated testing required for a branch to be mergable, I probably would have been pretty comfortable lodging straight to production. On the other end of the spectrum I've also worked on projects which arguably were developed in production given that the production instances were so dissimilar to what was actually checked in to source control or running in any test environment and, of course, no test cases to be seen.
The standard approach to making production deployments as safe as possible is to try and ensure that the thing you are planning to deploy is as rigorously tested as possible, and to do that most of the testing will need to be automated, otherwise you'll just end up spending your life testing.
Additionally, most modern systems use standard patterns to make a production roll back an extemely frictionless task, if not to automate it entirely. If you are deploying canaries of your software, or you are running a blue/green deployment and can have built in mechanisms to roll back if certain success conditions aren't met, then it further reduces the risk of a production change breaking something.
Essentially, I would question anyone telling you how to manage and derisk your production releases unless they are just as intimate with the software as you are.