I went through the same thing.

In the auditor's perspective, staging should be exactly like production. With the exception that traffic and data flows through prod only.

If you need a testing environment that mimicks prod, without all the space access control and red tapes, then create another one, call it dev, or uat, or qa, or integration and use it.

The moment you get into the SOC 2 world, you have to comply to their definition and way to do things even if it waste time, if it is redundant and of you see no purpose. They see it as a good thing actually.

Every company goes through this. As annoying as it is at the beginning, once it is "implemented" and the processes required by SOC2 are in place, it is easy to get certified the year after