It got a little bit better, first with trains (bundling together PRs so they weren't going out one at a time), and then the merge queue started automating most of the testing and fitting together PRs into bundles that could go out together. But by the time I left GH last year it had devolved into roughly the same amount of hassle; I had multiple days where I could queue a PR for deploy mid-morning and not have the deploy containing it go out until dinnertime, and I'd need to keep an eye out in Slack in case merge or test conflicts arose.