I have a branch lock on dev and main so that you can only merge through PR. So I created a branch from dev called "renovate_updates". In the renovate config I set the baseBranch config parameter to this branch. I also enabled automerge and minimumReleaseAge.

On GitHub I created two actions:

1. It gets triggered on the 14th and the 1st of a month and creates a PR from renovate_updates to dev and assigns it to me. I use an action to identify as a github app that I have given the rights to in the repo. Within the github action you can use gh cli.

2. Everytime there is a merge to the dev branch the action gets trigerred and does a rebase of dev of that "renovate_updates" branch.

The nice thing about this is that Renovate creates an Issue in your repo and you can still force versions if you need them earlier.