I'd argue that it is completely useless. They have the actual parser that runs in production and then a separate "test parser" that doesn't actually reflect reality? Why?
I read that they pushed a new configuration file, so possibly they don't consider that a "software update" and pushed it to everyone. Which is obviously insane. If I am publishing software, it doesn't matter if I've changed a .py file or a .yaml file. A change is a change and it's going to be tagged with a new version.
So how do people handle this in practice if the users table in this example has a ton of traffic? It might not ever succeed even with exponential backoff. It also seems strange that Postgres would need to lock the entire table just to add a new column.
I'm in a really similar position to you. I'm currently engineer #1 at a seed stage startup making $155k with 1.5% equity. But a year in I'm realizing I've built their entire product from scratch while they do sales and outreach. Obviously those things are important but I'm a leg of a tripod holding the whole thing up and yet I have a fraction of the equity they have. Makes no sense.
Did they just now discover abstract base classes?