Huh, they usually do? I'm not a full-time developer though so I'm surely biased towards doing the obvious quick fixes or already-discussed things, but discussing how to solve a problem before throwing something at the wall seems like the normal thing to do for me

Or is their point about abandoned projects where the dev never clicks release after merging, or even never merges?

The joke was that we have open pull requests that we cannot merge because of this downtime.

The point is you can't ship shit during an outage.