Same here. A forward only approach works best for us too. if you need to clean up a mess, it is a new migration script. It's too complex to try an work backwards. What if multiple scripts were ran? Then you have to roll back say script number 2 out of 5 and there were destructive operations. It becomes really hairy really quickly. So forward-only is the easiest to reason about.

Please do make sure that you have snapshots for restoring if you really mess up badly. I know its not always feasible to do snapshots before every deploy, but having a daily snapshot can bring you a lot of comfort.

If you built your own migration tool (highly encourage it, its not that hard to build a forward-only migration tool), then you can trigger selective snapshots/table dumps for only the tables that gets changed, and only for specific operations (updating schema, dropping columns, dropping table) before your migration scripts touches the db - that way you have a path to restore. You don't always need a full DB dump (say you have 500+ tables but only changing 2, 1 of which is destructive, thus the backup is tiny and quick). It also helps if different data sets live in isolation to help manage this kind of admin.