Or maybe testing new features on selected routes and specific customers before roll out

I'd argue that QA or Staging environments are the place to make sure that your deployment to specific customers before full roll out actually works, rather than doing your testing on the live environment!

After all, how much testing can you actually do if you end up breaking the site! Plus there's also the irritating thing that customers actually want to use the existing site as well...!
I think the definition of "test" at EK is a bit too broad!