For someone entirely outside of the payments space, what are those obvious reasons please?

>> the operating system is painful to use and never stops being painful to use.

But this is regretful, and slows down everything by orders of magnitude. One of the big problems is lack of EFFICIENT documentation/Quick Starts. The guides are labrynthine in layout, looping and colliding spiders' webs of wtfness.

Not really.

Access to production and its data should be highly regulated. Ideally no dev machine has any kind of write access to prod - instead it's commit access to a (non-master) branch which needs multiple approvals to be merged into a release branch.

Access to dev environments and their local code? Who cares, let them explore. As long as all code is reviewed prior to deploying, they could even be developing on a compromised machine and the live system will still be secure.

Your gut reaction is disgust and I don't blame you. You could do without the insults, however. The "nation's banking infrastructure" is outdated and messy. There is no chance in the entire world to upgrade it or clean it up if we the workers are not equipped with the power to do so. A first step could be informational transparency, I would for example really like read access on other systems in the bank and not just my own. Truthfully, separation of duties in this case is more of a controlling function and less of a security function. Of course I care about security, we all do. But let's not stifle the workers that can change the system from within in such low risk work that it's bordering on fear of change. Don't insult me again on something you know nothing about and haven't seen with your own eyes.