alt Hacker NewsIf there is an audience for release notes I haven't seen anything better than just committing entries to a pre-release folder as you change things and have release automation compile the folder into the actual release notes. Python and many other large projects handle it like this: https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/main/Misc/NEWS.d/next (The release notes for major releases are crafted manually)
On the other hand, for many projects you can probably skip release notes: nobody will read them. Even fewer people would read automatically generated changelogs: don't bother setting it up. Releasing instead of deploying from master also implies you took more care than usual, did you? Commit messages make sense for cohesive changes, are they? Didn't think so.
If you make use of something like git-cliff style formatting for the first line of your commit messages it can actually make some decent automated release notes that can be broken down into features, bug fixes, documentation, chores, etc...
I've found this to be pretty useful for my projects, and users can quickly get a list of what they care about for changes (usually the features part). Since it's pretty automated, the amount of effort also means that even if barely anyone reads them, it's not a huge waste of time. It's actually kind of made me write better, more useful commit messages as I know that the first line of the commit will actually be presented to the user.