And even if you did, there's no guarantee that the work in master is actually in a sane state. Some try to follow models like master is always runnable, or test

And even if you did, there's no guarantee that the work in master is actually in a sane state. Some try to follow models like master is always runnable, or tested/built by ci/cd, but it's often simply not the case. I've worked on atleast a few open source projects where I'd pull and build master, trying to obtain a particular bugfix, and it would fail, and I'd have to randomly rollback commits until I found a working build. In one case the project had a seperate repo for a library that wasn't kept entirely in sync with the parent project.. had to randomly move back both repos until I found a matching pair that built and ran successfully, but after the bugfix was implemented. Releases are important for anyone who isn't working on the repository directly -- they gaurantee the project is in a sane state.