Most companies are not prepared to pay for a staging environment identical to production

GitOps doesn’t provide a solution to propagating changes from one stage to the next one. We recommend using only a single environment and avoid stage propagation altogether. But if you need multiple stages (e.g., DEV, QA, PROD, etc.) with an environment for each, you need to handle the propagation outside of the GitOps scope, for example by some CI/CD pipeline.

The benefits of applying GitOps best practices are far reaching and provide:

GitOps is a way to do Kubernetes cluster management and application delivery.  It works by using Git as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. With GitOps, the use of software agents can alert on any divergence between Git with what's running in a cluster, and if there's a difference, Kubernetes reconcilers automatically update or rollback the cluster depending on the case. With Git at the center of your delivery pipelines, developers use familiar tools to make pull requests to accelerate and simplify both application deployments and operations tasks to Kubernetes.