When you diff the `bash-5.3` tag against the `bash-5.3-rc2` tag, the set of changes is reduced by a ton. It's the same story with previous release commits (at least for as far as I care to go back)... there's a "next version" branch that gets tagged with alpha, beta, and rc releases, and then there's a release commit that's made on master with the changes from the "next version" branch, plus some additional changes.
Why do they do things this way? I have no idea, but it clearly seems to work for them.
(Independently importing release tarballs into VCS also worked better in the era of a dozen competing VCSes, without reliable export-import pipelines.)
My observations and questions were about the GNU bash git repo and how (and why) the bash maintainers do release branching and tagging. They were not about how the Debian folks handle their packaging.
