It sounds like no releases have ever been made from any of the
"bugfix" branches going back over two years since their creation. Is
this a change in how the Ironic team views those branches, or was
the intention always to tag releases on them but nobody had gotten
around to it?

The primary consumer historically of bugfix branches have been downstream packagers of Ironic -- e.g. openshift. I'm pursuing creating releases of these because after doing some research, we have customers consuming these releases from pypi (6000 downloads of our Zed-cycle releases in 4 months). I do not want those deployers, consuming upstream artifacts, to miss out on backported bugfixes and patches that would be provided in a vendor release artifact.

There is no urgency behind getting the bugfix releases made, but the current situation where the Ironic community maintains additional branches for longer term support but does not provide stable releases for customers puiling upstream release artifacts is not one I wish to perpetuate.

Jay Faulkner