Right now, there's a lot of ceremony to create release branches on 20+ repos. At the end of our two-week agile sprint, there's always a ton of confusion about "is the release branch open", "should I commit to develop", people opening PRs for review targeting the wrong branch (e.g. trying to merge into release/ but they open feature/ against develop), then accidentally merging release into develop and vice versa...it's just kind of a mess.
Maybe it's just my team that sucks at gitflow? Or our tooling could be better? It just seems like a lot of complexity to manage for a single person who isn't a full-time build/release engineer.
Also, if you don't mind me asking, how frequently do you deploy? We're at once every two weeks but I'm trying hard to move the org toward once/day or more, it's pretty insane how much organizational resistance I have to fight because deployments = "change" = scary.