The draft releases caused issues for SMAPI's update flow, because...
1. Updates are releases to Nexus first, since that doesn't trigger update alerts. If there are no major issues, they're released to GitHub a few days later.
2. Update alerts work by fetching the last two SMAPI GitHub releases. The GitHub API doesn't allow ignoring drafts, so SMAPI just ignores any drafts in those top two slots.
3. The new build workflow created a draft release for each version tag.
That meant that releasing a second SMAPI update to Nexus before the GitHub release (like 4.5.0 + 4.5.1) would break update alerts for all players with a "Found no GitHub release for this ID" error, since the two latest releases were both ignored.
