One Git ref instead of thousands: a better way to track release history

Release should be separated from deployment, there should be virtually no difference between the code running production and other envs, instead of creating a release per environment you should just tag your code with an easy to read label (e.g. a version number) produce artifacts from that version of the code, then at deploy time you decide (either manually or through an automated logic) which version of the code you want to use. Ideally all "differences" at runtime between production and other envs should be defined at, well, runtime i.e. through environment variables (even the frontend stuff that you see usually made at build time, there should be a mechanism at runtime to avoid it) this way you have much more predictable behavior and it's easier to reason on, also you can physically separate building from deployment pipelines, so you can have much more agility on switching to whatever is needed, it's also much more easier on the brain (and for LLMs) to clearly see the steps and fix ci pipelines problems.

If you really need build time differences, then you should identify this difference by what really is not by the env you assume it will run on, because explicit is always better than implicit, especially for LLMs and new devs.