&gt; There may be people that don&#x27;t care how their query is actually executed, but I doubt it&#x27;s the common case.<p>I&#x27;m 100% sure its common.<p>&gt; Or been surprised to find out that production doesn&#x27;t have that index but staging does.<p>That&#x27;s the same problem as having different application code on staging then what gets deployed to production; this isn&#x27;t a problem with queries working independent of indexes its a problem of broken release processes, which requiring more ceremony to make queries work will not fix.