We can, and do. Knowing that the merges are going to wind up as items in the changelog leads us to size and structure them accordingly, or at least make a best effort to. The end result is a changelog where most PRs are somehow "noteworthy" and the ones that aren't (usually "chore" type in Conventional Commits lingo) can all be grouped together down the tail end.

The point isn't to produce a perfect result, but one that is "good enough". With this system, the friction to produce a new release is so low, and we have so many projects, that we can easily push out a steady stream of releases at very low cost with this approach. And following the pattern across all the projects has been great for consistency, compared to the relative chaos in patterns and procedures that we had before.