A lot of these can be avoided by making all the steps repeatable. To do that, you should run everything in a Docker container that's built solely from version c

A lot of these can be avoided by making all the steps repeatable. To do that, you should run everything in a Docker container that's built solely from version controlled files, and run it on a remote system that gets blown away regularly. You can use Jenkinsfiles to specify exactly what to do with different branches, and to really simplify things, you can have a different job for every kind of release. Build in a dry-run option so you can run a whole release without actually publishing anything. Each of your software projects can have its own specific release steps in a script run by your release container, while still following the same basic release process for all your projects.