The phrase “release early, release often” has nothing to do with shipping or production. The phrase comes from open source projects making their code available

The phrase “release early, release often” has nothing to do with shipping or production. The phrase comes from open source projects making their code available quickly and iteratively, often before reaching even an MVP, as part of the normal development process. That said, your points about rushing out incomplete and buggy software do seem to reflect the status quo. Every project I have worked on in the past 10 years had technical debt that often interfered with my engineering efforts, because almost no one bothers to clean up their work after they get their branch working.