I use it in production so i can crawl instagram (and others) without paying for proxies. Tor is single threaded so I have 6 docker containers that run tor proxies to get more bandwith out of it. The best thing about tor is that you set it up once and it will work forever for free.

Tor is great at busting through NATs, if you set it up in advance.

I'll often set up a hidden service on a machine, so I can SSH into it, fix port forwarding, and figure out what IP it currently has.