I have seen it, but in very traditional orgs, where system administrators and developers were in very different realms, and mostly communicate through a ticketing system. Similar things between DBAs and programmers in that environment. Why are the queries slow in production?

So it's not an uncommon problem to have wherever there's no clear line of responsibility, and no real shared ownership. It's only unrealistic in the sense that, if you have those kind of problems in a company as small as Pied Piper, I'd expect the product to not work at all.