I'm pretty sure that if I stood up in my office, I could find one or two people who would rubber stamp a change for me, assuming it was in good faith/approved, and would discuss implementation details/issues with the code, rather than question the reason for the changes. Particularly if the changes were tagged with a Jira. If your only defence is "well, what I did wasn _technically_ allowed", you lose the benefit of the doubt.

Incidents like this are the reason why red tape ends up introduced on small teams, and are what turn projects into a nightmare to work on.