But vscode being a day old is no big deal IMO. We've disabled the update pop-ups already, and there's hardly ever any new features you will want immediately.
How many hours have we spent after fixing something in akmods to then babysit the build, so we can click main to rebuild, and then click the downstream images. Hours.
We can stop the merge queue from pushing to the "production" tags (latest, stable etc), and re-tag the merge-queue builds as those prod tags in the push trigger. So:
Merge queue builds all images, pushes to merge-queue only tags
Push trigger re-tags merge queue tags with production tags
Also, we can configure Renovate to group all images together, so it makes one PR for all images in a repo. This can be combined with a timer to merge things after say an hour to catch any straggling builds.