That is a great example of how proper development and testing should work, but still requires a proper procedure to utilize effectively.
An alternate site for folks to bang upon and to test all functionality works before releasing to the masses. I know just enough to realize that this is not going to catch everything, but should certainly catch the vast majority of larger issues.
The other critical portion is having a backout and/or rollback plan. If significant workflows/functions are not working in a new release within a reasonable timeframe, someone needs to pull the plug and revert back to older versions known to be stable and working until they are fixed and then try again...
Your devotion and hard work supporting the Ecency project and helping others utilize it (including myself) are commendable.
Website migration Ecency did was a major change. They completely rewrote the entire codebase in three months and after release there were undetected glitches. We had to suggest people use a rollback site while devs worked it all out.