Putting Pulumi in a regularly-triggered pipeline is a goal. Your ways of working would have to be quite mature to support that. Most orgs demand gate controls in front of most environments, so manual (or at least, manually-triggered) deployments are more common.

I've been using Pulumi for years, and Terraform before that, and still haven't managed to convince anyone to put a prod env into a fully automatic pipeline. True CD is still a (pipe)drream.

+ let's us deal with state moves or destroying resources with comments

We do it this way because we have different types of users. IAM can't be controlled by users, it has to follow review processes so only an SA is allowed control. Then there's the infra admins, who can do local IaC applies for testing purposes, or clickops for experiments. Then app engineers, who sometimes need to configure things in IaC. They'll have enough perms to plan locally, but not apply