Perhaps an unpopular take, but what is described in the first paragraph as "smoother, easier and faster" than ever seems to refer to an upgrade process that has been going on for over a year.

> As soon as we finished the Rails 5.2 upgrade last year, we started upgrading our application to Rails 6.0.

> Instead of waiting for the final release, we’d upgrade every week by pulling in the latest changes from Rails master and run all of our tests against that new version. This allowed us to find regressions quickly and early—often finding regressions in Rails master just hours after they were introduced. Upgrading weekly made it easy to find where these regressions were introduced since we were bisecting Rails with only a week’s worth of commits instead of more than a year of commits. Once our build for Rails 6.0 was green, we’d merge the pull request to master, and all new code that went into GitHub would need to pass in Rails 5.2 and the newest master build of Rails.

Realistically how many hours of work went into this upgrade process then?

Edit: I should add I think it really is wonderful that Github contributed so much to the new release and was so involved. I'm just not sure that it is realistic or even ideal for the average Rails consumer to upgrade in this manner.