Release management gets treated as scheduling: decide the date, track the items, chase the stragglers. Teams that ship calmly are not better at chasing. They have designed the release so that less chasing is needed.
What that design looks like
Integration is continuous rather than terminal. If the first time all the parts meet is release week, release week is where all the surprises live, and there is no time left to absorb them.
Quality gates sit where the work happens. A gate at the end tells you something is wrong after it is expensive. The same check before merge tells you while it is cheap.
Scope is decided by what is ready, not by what was promised. A release that ships what is done on the date beats one that ships late with everything, and it beats one that ships on time with something half-finished by a wide margin.
The part people resist
Somebody must be allowed to say a thing is not going in. If that authority is unclear, every release becomes a negotiation under time pressure, which is the worst possible condition for that decision.
Giving that authority to the release owner is not bureaucracy. It is what makes the date meaningful, and a meaningful date is what lets everyone else plan.