24C feature-Option to bypass CI/CD, need more clarification

Summary:

We have a feature in 24C as below:

• Option to bypass CI/CD pipelines for deployment

You now have the option to deploy your extension directly to your development environment without using CI/CD pipelines. CI/CD pipelines provide advanced functionality, for example, you can use CI/CD pipelines to deploy dependent artifacts to the target environment in parallel or delete extensions to clean up the environment. If you don't need this functionality, you can opt to disable pipelines to deploy your extension.

My question is: If we bypass CI/CD pipeline, how does deployment in prod environments happen? Do we still need pipeline for production? Is this bypass of CI/CD pipeline just for the development instance where VBS is linked with eg TEST?