You can find developer first roles where the company puts a lot of time and energy into making developers the most efficient workers, but most companies are a cluster-fuck of resource management and you'll be lucky to find a healthy company that also puts developers first in this way.

In my experience, recreating staging as "production junior with caveats" comes down to cost and living with bad architecture/design. I'm not defending the practice, but I do think it's incredibly common.