Despite the article, I'm not quite sure I understand exactly what this entails.

Mainly I'm confused what this check is gating. Based on the article it's hard to tell what they mean.

1. Code changes that may conflict with each other in the repo, in the sense of a merge conflict.

2. Regressions (test failure, build breakage) caused by recently checked-in code.

3. Preparing and verifying a new release prior to deployment.

4. Monitoring/canary a release candidate with real users.

In my mind, these are all very different things, but the article seems to mix them up.