I've seen the "just say no" thing institutionalized through SRE, where they can use the "banhammer" to stop the deployment of new features or whatever hasn't passed their various "reliability checklists" and such (if they're responsible for on-call)

I'm sure this won't be popular but a lot of "SRE" teams were definitely ZIRP phenomenon, heh.

as someone on the other side who has had to deal with deploys that go from 5PM to 2AM due to bad code changes, and being on call with 40+ pages a day, there's a reason why SREs are just say no when they're the first responders to outages caused by poorly implemented features. I'm not saying just say no is the right mentality but I can see why many develop the cynical anti-change mentality

Would you want to be on call for someone else's garbage though? There's a very obvious and real tension here.