CI/CD workflow hardening and release-process observability #4880
Description
Objective
Increase CI/CD reliability and maintainability by standardizing workflow behavior and improving release-adjacent observability.
In Scope
- Consistent checkout/auth and token handling across affected workflows.
- Manual trigger coverage where maintainers need controlled on-demand runs.
- Consistent artifact/provenance behavior across release-related pipelines.
- Clear API-shipping signal in CI logs showing per-target change counts.
- Reduced workflow configuration drift to simplify review and audit.
Out of Scope
- Product/runtime behavior changes outside build, docs, release, and API-shipping automation.
- Versioning policy changes or new release channels.
Done When
- Affected workflows exhibit consistent permission/auth behavior.
- Required doc/release-adjacent workflows are manually triggerable.
- API shipping output shows an explicit per-target count indicator.
- Workflow diffs are easier to review due to reduced formatting/config variance.