I disagree. Hot loading means I can have a very short cycle on an issue, and move onto something else. Having to think about the implications of hot loading is worth it for the rapid cycle time and not having to hold as many changes in my mind at once.

One thing that would help both is deployment automation that could examine the desired changes and work out the best way to deploy them without human input. For distributed systems, this would require rock-solid contracts between individual services for all relevant scenarios, and would also require each update to be specified completely in code (or at least something machine readable), ideally in one commit. This is a level of maturity that seems elusive in gaming.