Some blatantly obvious thing that I was oblivious to before dipping my toes into databases:

How Changes are Committed into DB

It’s the same way as git commit:

1. Make changes all you want
2. Commit said changes into database (as a transaction)

How Databases are Deployed

1. Local: initialize the database
2. Local: create a migration describing the initial table setup
3. Local: commit the migration files into version control
4. Server: pull the migration file changes from version control
5. Server: initialize the database
6. Server: run an upgrade, to replay the migrations