I regularly republish / redeploy quite a few ASP.NET MVC websites deployed to Amazon AWS, Windows Azure and private webservers and don't see any reasons why your team makes such a big deal of it.
However, you should design you websites in such a way so that tasks like updating texts and links should be done through the database via the website admin interface.
My point is that while changes to a live website are OK (it's called development), redeploying the application to change a text string is likely indicative of a bad design. I am not suggesting the republishing could be done without care.
