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When I was at Microsoft circa 2018, our team had a senior engineer whose primary job was doing manual validation of releases. That and keeping a single custom legacy build server running.

I would love to share my experience of release management at MSFT but it would out me.

In the ballpark of 20ish engineers chasing build errors and test failures for a month to bump a version number (one line change).

Because it worked out for you, that time. As a manager and probably the person that would have told you no, or to justify more before we attempt it, I've seen this scenario go pear-shaped way more times than not. It's about risk, priorities, and specifically knowledge/experience (sometimes wrong) that says this is "not a good idea". Sometimes it's also just plain old complacency, though.

It's amazing how many people you can hire (and how many bugs you can ship with) when you sell something that's free to distribute and has no true competition.