You worked places with style guides? Did... Did you have a real testing environment that wasn't prod too?

Yes, and the style guides reached far beyond things like “use camel case”. I’m talking guidelines for how whole blocks of code should be formatted. Also weren’t allowed to throw exceptions at all even though we were using up-to-date modern C++. Some guidelines had good intentions and others were just put in by OCD control freaks that no one felt like opposing.

And yes, we had a testing environment, although we mostly depended on manual QA rather than software tests. Medical devices can’t test in prod, fortunately