@kernellogger ah, I thought you meant "anywhere from 6.1.x" with "6.1", but meant what I mean with "6.1.0": what was released by Linus, not anything from stable.
Yeah in that case both of your original points work; from a git perspective (tooling) not really a difference.
I would still do the releases manually, to avoid commits from the merge window / early RC, as these might have other/unrelated issues, which got fixed in a later RC.