For many Common Lisp scenarios, it's actually similar -- start with the raw based image, load in your code and data, snapshot it, and ship the resulting artifact. At least for me, interactive development aside, it's not untoward to restart a CL system from scratch as a routine part of development. We're not running on Lisp Machines anymore where restarting was actually quite expensive (though there were anecdotes about how at some point it was faster to restart a LispM than let it grind through its GC process, I don't know about that).
However, I don't know how common that is with Smalltalk. How often they restart from scratch. Saving the image is routine in Smalltalk. Where in Lisp you CAN save the image, it's not necessarily part and parcel operationally, historically, or culturally to constantly save the image, especially post LispM. In Smalltalk it is.
I think with CL folk moreso build a new base image, load in some routine utilities, etc. to form a baseline. But application code and image are separate.
Smalltalk, they're not. Code is part of the image (it's stored separately, but it's presented as if they're one and the same). So the image is a much more first class citizen in the Smalltalk world, rather than, perhaps, an artifact.
Especially today, I imagine they have build processes that build up the entire thing again from scratch, but it would not surprise me if they bumped into problems where the image and the source code "don't quite match" that they have to suss out in testing before deployment, because something slipped through and tweaked the long saved image that wasn't properly captured.
In any case, while I'm sure it doesn't quite happen like that today, its not unreasonable to have someone ship a "ball of mud" Smalltalk image in contrast to one in CL.
