Does a change being accepted into master equal it becoming live in production at your company? That seems even more ludicrous.
Where I am, and at other good companies that I know of, "a change being accepted into main" equals processes being automatically started, that progress it through further environments and test suites, that if they all go well, result in "it becoming live in production" with no further human intervention.
So you oversimplified, but it's a qualified yes.
Continuous deployment is a very safe and productive way of working. It encourages small batches of change and thorough automated testing. If you find it "ludicrous" that says more about you than anything else. There are books on the subject if you're interested.
It's hilarious to sit back and watch every other team have the same monthly loop of big change -> lengthy test cycle -> "go-live" meeting -> fixes/big change -> more testing... etc. Loads of stress and finger-pointing.
Hardly ever hear a peep from the CD team. Sure, it's not all rainbows and lollipops. They do have urgent production issues time-to-time, but most are resolved by a rollback (or feature toggle flipped).
Mainly for your colleague's stress levels, and secondarily for the business's success.
Nothing should go there unless it's a candidate for deployment.
To me continuous deployment means deploying features as they are ready (and the smaller the better), rather than batching up big 'releases'. It does not mean deploying code line-by-line.
All IMHO of course.
Note that i'm not endorsing the practice. I find it scary too.