The trigger_release job (used in the artifact publishing pipelines) assumes that your project is configured to use bump2version, and adheres to the following development lifecycle (similar to maven release plugin):
Semantic versioning is used. Work is done in development branches and merged into the main branch. The main branch is always on a '.dev' release. Releases are made by removing the .dev release suffix and committing a tag.
Reference: https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/data-engineering/workflow_utils/-/tree/main/gitlab_ci_templates