I wouldn't say it's necessarily weird, and I'd never call it unprofessional, but I have also been using CI of some shape or form since I entered the industry in the '00s. From home brewed scripts that were cobbled together internally, to CI servers on-prem, to CI servers in the cloud, and now back to on-prem. At work, I am literally in the middle of a massive migration of my teams multiple CI servers. We have dozens, sometimes hundreds of jobs kicked off on a daily basis + at least 2 dozen nightlies. Without CI, our team would be dead in the water.

I'd expect what the CI/CD typically does is split into different parts of your process ?

I also had jobs where CI/CD were completely accessory, but in exchange we were doing a lot more work on our local machines and deploy pipelines.

In comparison I currently see repos where remote editing files straight from gitlab and merging the changes is enough to get everything shipped.

I see it as a difference in philosophy more than what's best or "professional".

Wait so you just merge right into prod? That sounds scary. The thing I work on runs like tens of thousands of tests on large PRs. It's reassuring but sometimes annoyingly slow.