A few comments:
Limiting staff rights to being on an as-needed basis makes good sense to me. There have a few incidents where staff have taken actions that they shouldn't. Limiting the scope of staff rights helps to contain the potential problems.
I'm sure that rights management becomes a more and more complex and time-consuming task with such a large headcount in WMF.
As rights become more granular, understanding them and understanding logs becomes complex too, so I'm hoping that we can try to find a good balance between having rights and logs that are granular with having rights and logs that are relatively easy for humans to understand and audit.
Thanks,
Pine