You should not be logging in to production unless something has gone seriously wrong. I've not seen a company where developers (minus a handful of "blessed" staff) even know how to access prod, let alone log in.
Also you shouldn't really use pod OS to debug it. Kubernetes supports debug containers: you launch a separate container (presumably with convenient debug environment) and mounts selected container rootfs inside, so you can inspect it as needed. It also helps, when the target container does not work and you can't just exec into it.
There's a recommendation to remove everything from the container that's not necessary for running a given program, that reduces attack surface.