Agreed, this sounds crazy. One argument raised is because staging is often different from prod. But their laptop are even more different. It seems the main goal was to save money. All this make sense only for a very small team and code base
We spend like 3-4k/yr tops on staging
I can sympathize with the costs in both time and money to maintain a staging environment, but you're going to pay for those bugs somehow - either in staging or in customer satisfaction.