That's not really been my experience. The number of people who knew how to deploy software at Google was much smaller than the number of people writing software there. I was certainly the only person on my team who ever dealt with the nitty gritty of running stuff in production. That seems about like the industry standard; I'd say the average software engineer in industry, inside or outside Google, considers their work done when their code is merged.
At my first job outside of Google we used something called Convox, which was very similar to running things in production at Google. You triggered a package build from your workstation (!) and then adjusted production to pick that up. Very similar to mpm packages and GCL files. (The difference is that Google had some machinery to say "while the build might have been triggered from a workstation, all this code has actually been checked in and reviewed". Convox did not have that part, so yeah, you could just edit some files and push them to production without checking them in, which wasn't great. But when you are a 4 person development team, not the end of the world by any means.)
