I also got a chance to work in such an organization in the 00's, where dev and ops closely aligned with each other's work to produce truly reliable, repeatable, fast, quality products, often. It was fantastic. Nobody would say "oh but you can't do that, that's not Infrastructure as Code!" They would say, "what can we all do to make this better?"
In the 90's and 00's I was responsible for maybe 20-30 servers, now I am responsible for somewhere around the 2000 mark..
While "oh but you can't do that, that's not Infrastructure as Code!" sounds lame, and your co-worker should learn to be a better communicator, things need to be reproducible when working with more complex systems and that calls for more rigorous review practices.
Please consider this: It's our pagers that go off at 3am when your code fails..
In our organisation, developers have need nor clearance to access live customer data. This means they stay out of production and we have to deal with breakage.
Usually I can just revert to an earlier version and file a bug report, sometimes I have to cherry pick.
Having developers "fix" things in production under time-stress at 3am without proper code review sounds like extremely poor practice.
Preventing calling the devs requires dev to front-load ops. Ops needs triage documents, remediation strategies, architectural and workflow diagrams, dependency charts, distributed tracing, intelligent logging, custom application metrics, and tests they can run during incidents to isolate causes.
The devs can do all of this on their own, teach ops how to use it, and then they'd only be called when it was a code issue. But as a dev, you probably don't know all of the above, so ops has to go to dev and be like, "hey y'all, if you don't want to be called, this is what we need."
And this is what DevOps is intended to fix: get everyone in a room, talk about problems, find solutions among everyone. If your org isn't doing this, you can start the change.
I also got a chance to work in such an organization in the 00's, where dev and ops closely aligned with each other's work to produce truly reliable, repeatable, fast, quality products, often. It was fantastic. Nobody would say "oh but you can't do that, that's not Infrastructure as Code!" They would say, "what can we all do to make this better?"