I dunno, that sounds like the a good way to do it.
I kinda shake my head if people call for devs to handle all the infrastructure and everything in prod. Why should a developer concern himself with details of scaling and tuning postgres, elasticsearch or loadbalancers? If you don't outsource that, that's the job for the ops team. However, if that's the responsibility of the ops team, there's no reason for dev to have access to these systems beyond the application layer. That just seems like a good way to split the work of running and scaling an application.
Now if we're talking about applications, that's something different. In fact, it's the contrary. I am a big proponent of having developers manage and configure their own applications, including prod. It's fast and makes them develop better applications. However, doing this for critical systems in a responsible way requires automation to enforce best practices. At our place, devs don't have root access to productive application servers, but devs have permissions to configure and use the automation controlling the productive application servers. And it's safe and rather risk-free because the automation does the right thing.
And it's also a different thing if we're talking about test. By all means, deploy a 3 container database cluster to poke around with it. I like experimentation and volatility in test setups and PoCs. Sometimes its just faster to solve the problem with 3 candidate technologies and go from there. Just don't expect things to go into production just like that. We'll have to think about availability, scaling and automating that properly first.