We need to balance between being able to merge work into operator repos that is required for GA, and content that will follow in subsequent releases.

Accordingly, for all of the operators, and associated tooling, we will create a branch named 18.0.0-proposed which Release Delivery will use as their import source for GA.

Developers may continue to merge PRs at will into their main branch, and should then cherry-pick/merge content into 18.0.0-proposed only if it is relevant for our current Blockers Only GA status.

This is a short-term plan to avoid a repetition of the beta merge-freeze, and will be followed up later with a larger plan that describes a full workflow.

Please merge any final Renovate PRs before branching Generating and landing of the last renovate patches are coordinated in https://redhat-internal.slack.com/archives/CQXJFGMK6/p1719935594938289