One-way DB Migration Workflow

I'm loving the proposed WordPress workflow shown below. However, since I am new to WordPress, I want to know how realistic it is.

DATABASES MOVE DOWN, CODE MOVES UP

This idea is presented both in a WPEngine support article for WordPress and in another article called No More Cowboy Coding. The idea is that a tool like WP Migrate DB is used to pull a production database into a dev environment, but the opposite is never true.

Problems?

I'm concerned about plugins that I add in my dev environment that might make changes to the DB structure. Indeed, WPEngine has another article stating:

There are sometimes circumstances where changes you make on your development instances involve both code and database changes. In these specific cases, you can still deploy your code changes “up.” However, you will also need to download an export of the specific tables you wish to import to your production environment using phpMyAdmin. Most commonly, you will want to specifically export the wp_options table, as well as any other tables specific to the changes you made in development. Did you add a plugin that added database tables?

I'd like to understand how commonly a 3rd party installed/activated plugins will make (structural) DB changes? If perhaps 50% of plugins have this behavior, then this workflow is almost useless. If instead only 1% of plugins have this behavior, then I'm hardly worried.

Does anyone have a sense of this?

Again, I'm trying to assess how realistic this workflow is. I'd also like to know how others are dealing with the (rare?) occasion when a plugin does modify the database.

To clarify, I do not expect I will be developing any of my own plugins or themes. I anticipate only integrating 3rd party plugins and themes on my local dev environment, which I would then push to staging or directly to production.