The database time bomb — no migrations, no backups, no rollback

Every schema change made straight to production without a record of it is a bet that nothing will ever go wrong. Eventually the bet loses.

You need a new column, so you add it directly. A field type needs to change, so you just change it. Some old data needs to go, so you run a delete query in production. No migration files, no version history, no way to recreate the database from scratch. Then something breaks — it always does — and you go to roll back. You can't. There's no record of what changed, no way to spin up a clean environment, and nobody can tell you the current schema. "I think the hosting provider backs it up automatically" is not an answer, because you've never actually tested a restore.

Two checks from this doctrine

Real value, not a teaser — two of the 4 checks in full. The rest are in the one-pager.

You can rebuild code. You can't rebuild lost data.