[hardwaresofton]

The post is very much not complete -- there is much more a team would have to standardize to fully take a set up like this into production, bu I'm not sure that it "completely breaks down" with more people contributing.

As long as there is some release coordination, a system like this can work. In particular, I've found that the lightest way to get a system like this working for x > 1 developers is to have a release-vX.X.X branch for releases that are going out and vX.X.X tags for releases once they have actually landed.

You mention the recognizing and tagging versions being an issue -- are you imagining a world where two people are releasing something at the same time? I'm not exactly sure

If we assume that what that posts suggests isn't feasible, regardless of how you deploy and do your CI, if your release process can be done by a human, it can likely be automated. Gitlab CI is most robust and yet easiest to understand automated CI system I've seen for making that happen (at least that was my intended point).