Sorry if my comment was unclear. I consider the queue to be a “branch” as well. Many people use a “develop” branch instead of a queue in this instance. The queue appears designed to allow arbitrary selection rather than merging in order (though the new solution with CD seems generally in order)

Totally agree that CD is required with this many commits. It’s commonplace on teams with many fewer developers. Was surprised to see you folks roll your own workflows rather than using other systems.

Would also be interesting to see if you tag commits that go to master in instrumentation systems so you have visibility into production metrics and can correlate them with what code was running at the time.