CM is there for both preventing fuck ups and dealing with them when they occur. First things first: do you have a test environment? If not, build one. Do you have documented processes? If not, document them.

Proper change management ensures that: 1. people in the group know what is going on. 2. you have a second/third set of eyes to ensure that you have both a plan, a backout plan (or plan B in case it can't be backed out) and a test methodology to ensure that a change hasn't broken things. 3. to make you think about the implications of what you are doing, and 4. that business stakeholders are informed and know how to plan around any impact both expected and unforeseen.

If you aren't doing all of those things already, sorry dude but you are just winging it. That's efficient, etc. until one day it all goes horribly wrong and you need to figure it out on the fly how to get back to normality, with unpredictable outage durations, etc. All of that should be worked out before going live with your changes.

Yes, it sounds like a lot of faffing about for no real benefit, but really, one day it will save your arse. And really, you will be surprised at just how many effects even a single change to a production system can have.

Not necessarily. There is talk of energy being 10,000x more abundant for humanity if we were to put development into the LFTR reactor. If we have cheap electricity via safe nuclear power, then using some of it to generate fuel from sea-water is surely a lot better than putting the effort into getting it out of the ground and then shipping it half-way around the world.

Then again, with cheap nuclear power, we can also effectively supply hydrogen (which is obviously much cleaner) for other internal combustion engines.

Um. When safety standards change in the industry I am in (Mining) they do actually require everyone to immediately replace what is "working" with something deemed to be safe against the particular mode of catastrophic failure that has been observed.

XP can be made safe if it is kept patched or isolated from the network. Choose one. If it is isolated, who cares. If it is not, then you're simply rolling the dice.