Thats not what he said. Unit tests are the first stage, and are very useful at isolating the problem.

Integration tests are the next where multiple units are combined.

Then there is staging.

Did they say that?

That might still happen this year, it’s the next step in the development plan.

What makes these launches “non-production” tests is that they are not carrying any valuable payload. Blowing up rockets like this is exactly what gives the company it’s advantage over competitors who try to anticipate everything during design stages.

There was no real payload on this, so I'd argue it's closer to a QA environment than production.

It's true that other rocket companies are treating launches as production, but SpaceX has always been doing "hardware-rich" testing.

Some domains have so many different parties doing different things, you just have to test in production. Rockets are probably one of them.

Testing their ability to deploy satellites is a short-term goal that will make them money now. Testing refuelling will be needed for Luna and Mars missions, but that’s a long way off anyway.

They had that on the timeline for 2023, so it's reasonable to assume they would do it.

Launching a rocket is far more complex than shipping a release.

It is more like an "all or nothing" process.

They likely did test it, and it passed. The leak was probably caused by the somewhat violent environment of the launch, and that can’t be entirely replicated on the ground.