A friend of mine is working for a small-ish startup (11 people) and he gets to work and sees the CTO push 10k loc changes straight to main at 3 am.

Probs fine when you are still in the exploration phase of a startup, scary once you get to some kind of stability

I feel like this becomes kind of unacceptable as soon as you take on your first developer employee. 10K LOC changes from the CTO is fine when it's only the CTO working on the project.

Hell, for my hobby projects, I try to keep individual commits under 50-100 lines of code.

Lol I worked at a startup where the CTO did this. The problem was that it was pure spaghetti code. It was so bad it kept me up at night, thinking about how to fix things. I left within 30 days

I worked with a “CTO” who did that before LLMs - one of the worst jobs I have had in the last 10 years. I spent at least 50% of my time putting out fires or refactoring his garbage code

The cto is ultimately responsible for the outcome and will be there at 4am to fix stuff.

I'd go mental if I was a SWE having to mop that up later

That's...idiotic.