Ephemeral test environments are a great tool for this kind of stuff. We do work on a feature branch and spin up a test environment for that feature. QA happens there, then it gets merged to master once they approve it.

In our workflow, it deploys immediately, but you could just as easily adapt that to cut a release every Thursday. Then each release can just contain whatever makes its way into master by Thursday. You might need to add more process if there’s release notes etc that need to be coordinated. My suggestion on that would be to cut the release on Tuesday or Wednesday, then whoever does that documentation can look at what made the cut and spend a day documenting it, then just press the deploy button on Thursday once they’re done.