My deploys got boring when I deleted three steps

For two years my deploy pipeline had a staging environment, a canary percentage, and a manual approval step. Releases were still scary.

Then I deleted three things:

1. The second environment. Staging was a slightly different copy of production, which meant it validated a system we didn't run. Now I test in production with a feature flag.
2. The canary percentage. Nobody watched it. A canary without an error-budget check is just a delayed rollout.
3. The manual approval. It was a formality that made people click faster without reading.

What's left is one artifact, one environment, a health check, and a rollback command that I've actually rehearsed.

Deploy frequency went up, and the on-call pager got quieter. Boring is the goal.

If you kept your approval step: what decision is it actually making?