This is a pretty small distinction in my experience, and I think you'd find that most people would go with "if it goes into prod, it counts as a release". Rega

This is a pretty small distinction in my experience, and I think you'd find that most people would go with "if it goes into prod, it counts as a release". Regardless of how confident you are on your feature-flagging functionality, everyone's going to be unimpressed if suddenly your "minor" deploy has caused a bunch of things to go haywire at 4:30pm on a Friday and now people have to stay back and fix things.