Another thing to note about this: we have plans in the RFC to build out some automation for plugins and themes to create branches compatible with different versions of Discourse.
I think the time to circle back to this would be after we get that in place.
This is possible to do now by setting the branch to track in your deployment config:
But once you do, you’re kind of pinned on that release forever. What we still need to build is a better way to see when a new release is available (on whichever release channel you’re following).
We have had some early discussions about how this might work, but are still discussing the details.