Having a few greybeards with the keys to the kingdom and the wisdom not to use it to screw around in prod, outside of existential emergencies, can be quite useful.

Also should have console access.

One time a bad config push took out a couple hundred webservers with effectively a single iptables default deny rule and we had to get a dozen people to fix them in chunks by logging in manually over remote terminal (probably could have expect-scripted that up, but it was quicker to just get it done).