avoid dangling commits as part of the release process

[jakobmoellerdev]

What would you like to be added:

Ideally we do not want to have any sort of dangling commit because they make it hard to associate tags with commit histories and statuses.
The best practice is to maintain both a release branch as well as a tag corresponding to that release branch.

See https://github.com/open-component-model/ocm/tree/v0.18.0-rc.1 for an example

Why is this needed:

Currently all releases are created via tag only, so the VERSION bump that is needed for the release is done through a dangling commit (a commit that is not part of the history of any branch in the repository).

This is not ideal and should be changed in the future.