I get where you're leading but I don't think it follows. FK constraints are an optional nicety with tradeoffs rather than something fundamental -- cascade and set null are footguns (and business logic which shouldn't live in the db), and no action exists to catch bugs in your code. If your app isn't getting errors from the db saying it's trying to delete stuff with references then you could, in theory, turn off the constraints without any need to change the code. And if a relational database simply didn't have FK constraints at all, such as vitess/planetscale, you can still maintain data integrity.
What I've done in the past with prod dbs that lack FK constraints is add them back for development, testing, and CI.
