Some projects, like CPython, collect changelog entries as individual files with random names in a dedicated directory. Then, a script assembles the changelog at release time. I always thought this was a nice and elegant solution: in some sense, a changelog is a list with no special merge handling, but a directory is a list (of files) that does have special merge handling, so you just use that as your substrate.

Yes, that's what we do at work with a tool similar to changie (https://github.com/miniscruff/changie) - which is really a conflict-free workflow that works pretty well.