I have done this accidentally at least once - we shipped a full-stack app, and telemetry started lighting up that on certain older phones and browsers (no points for guessing which brand and browser), the release version didn't load. The minifier did something in the release build that it didn't like.
So after a quick test, it was decided to deploy the debug version of just the frontend as a bandaid. Next day we saw we managed to deploy the debug version of the backend with admin stuff like this as well..
Did this too when I was working for a company that decided dongle-protecting their software was a good idea. We shipped with the protection check no-op'd out for, ah, debugging purposes and it never got re-enabled. Not really sure if it was by-accident-on-purpose or not.
So after a quick test, it was decided to deploy the debug version of just the frontend as a bandaid. Next day we saw we managed to deploy the debug version of the backend with admin stuff like this as well..