This is frankly a disastrous impact to the usability of Observable notebooks for Free Individuals (the new free tier). From the FAQ (https://talk.observablehq.com/t/faq-october-2022-platform-ch...)
Q: With live public notebooks, is there a way to stage edits before making them public?
[...]
For Free users, we also recommend that they fork the notebook (which would be public), make the edits and merge the changes back.
Although the forked notebooks would be public, it would be a temporary notebook which could be deleted once merged.
Like fine, kneecap your free product if you really need to force people to fork over cash. But Observable purports to be a platform that is trying to democratise data analysis and visualisation for the masses. Feels a bit like Wikipedia adding its own paid tier.