I am in that particular situation, only one workspace where we have a prod and dev branch (and feature branches of course).

And we are in the process of setting up a development environment.

Why? Because it takes too much time and effort to make sure you do not break anything in prod.

Also all of our source systems have DEV/PROD, and sometimes we need to extract from dev systems, into our production data lake... You see where it gets nasty?

If it were purely the notebook code, a separate environment is not necessary, but there is more to it than that.

My ideal situation however would be to have split environments for code but not for the data itself.

LakeFS f.e. would be a nice to have (git for data!).