Automatic deployment to production environment

A lighter weight strategy is to use this:

Note the “only show overriden” in top right

That will give you a list of things which aren’t default which you might transfer manually.

Depending on your need this might be simpler. (That said, I’ve got 100 + settings that are not default on my several year old instance.)

app.yml can be partially copied.

Of course that won’t carry across Categories etc.