[throwaaskjdfh]

Along those lines, this was an interesting statement:

"You should learn how to use these commands, but they shouldn't be a regular part of your prod workflows. That will lead to a flaky system."

It seems like there's some theory vs. practice tension here. In theory, you shouldn't need to use these commands often, but in practice, you should be able to do them quickly.

How often is it the case in reality that a team of Kubernetes superheroes, well versed in these commands, is necessary to make Continuous Integration and/or Continuous Deployment work?

[lazyant]

For the read-only commands, you can obv use them as much as you can, the issue is with the write commands. I see them as a tool for troubleshooting (eg, you are adding a debugging pod, not changing the running system) and emergency work that would be faster on command line than running the CI/CD pipeline but the final state needs to be in sync with the code (tools like ArgoCD help with this), otherwise it's a mess.