Full disclosure, I’m one of the owners of ReleaseNotes.io. Not trying to pitch, just sharing what we see across a lot of teams.

1. For OSS projects, GitHub Releases honestly work really well. You usually have contributors who understand the context, and readers who are technical enough to parse a changelog.

2. If you're talking to users, Release notes stop being a dev artifact and become a communication channel. They need to show up where users already are, in-app, email, Slack, etc. There are a bunch of tools like us (ReleaseNotes.io), LaunchNotes, AnnounceKit, Canny and others that help with that.

3. From what we see, the teams that have the most success with automation of this process treat GitHub PRs or Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear, GitHub issues as the source of truth. Also their issues/PR descriptions tend to clearly describe the problem and the solution.

4. Any automation of this process leans heavily on the quality of your issue/PR descriptions as garbage-in = garbage-out. Because of this it's tricky to fully automate the process as at some level you usually need a person casting an eye over the release note just to sense check.