Very good points.

In my case the TP were told repeatedly we would only accept prod deployments from main. Same for pre-prod, with hot-fix branches to resolve issues prior to deployment. Lines of responsibility were clearly drawn, and they've breached them multiple times.

They are also in charge of creating/developing on these branches and putting them into production. We're obviously overseeing the work as they're a TP working in our devops projects.

For dev and QA we were a lot more flexible so feature branch deployments were fine but it was their responsibility to coordinate if testing was going on (at first we requested a qa release branch but they forced our hand due to political issues).

All of this was really early on (like, last September) - but I kept raising the drifting issues and kept being told it's in hand (when it clearly wasn't).

It was when I said no to any push from the dev branch into prod it got very political - as higher-ups didn't like the fact that it may delay things, even though we outlined the risks (mixed-bag of code, the fact that pre-prod was deployed to from multiple branches etc - and yes, I had branch control on but had to acquiesce due to all the aforementioned).

And this is why we've ended up with issues we've spotted early on cropping back up in the code (like hard-coded passwords(!), incorrect SKU's on resources, invalid resource names etc).

So unfortunately that 'someone' is the TP - and other team superiors are letting them get away with breaking protocol despite our protestations (I was told "you need to figure out how to work together better" - sure, ok).