Years ago I worked at a family-run business with a good working environment. The staff were once told a story of how, earlier in the company's history, a manager made a mistake that caused the company a substantial monetary loss.

The manager immediately offered their resignation, but the owner said to them, "Why would I let you go now? I've just spent all this money so you could learn a valuable lesson!"

So yeah, generally, most managers' reaction to accidentally deleting vital data from production is going to be to fire the developer as a knee-jerk "retaliation", but if you think about it, the best response is to keep that developer; your data isn't coming back either way, but this developer has just learned to be a lot more careful in the future. Why would you send them to a potential competitor?