We had a gitflow pipeline that looked clean on paper: develop feeds a release branch, the same build artifact promotes through dev, qa, sit, uat, and prod, and once prod is green we tag the commit on main. Textbook. Then a production bug showed up on a Tuesday afternoon, and the diagram stopped mattering. The standard gitflow answer is to branch a hotfix off the tag, PR it back into release, run it through the pipeline, and once it's proven in UAT, merge to main and cherry-pick the same commi...