Hi @colanim!
Thank you for the kind words! Release notes are an important part of the project, as mentioning each contributor’s contribution is essential: the project would not exist without these contributions.
In the past, we were doing everything manually, but, as you have seen, it is error-prone in a domain where errors are not acceptable. In order to mitigate this, we built a tool that scans all commits merged since the previous version, and formats them correctly. We’re left with a big list of contributions that can copy/paste in the release notes. I’d happily share the tool with you but it has quite a few flaws that make it unfit for general usage.
Then comes a second important part, where we do it like you do: we do everything at once, filtering PRs and grouping them in categories. This is indeed time-consuming, but it is important work. It serves as documentation, and as a guide for potential breaking changes. It is not unusual to spend between 1 and 2 hours on release notes, reordering commits in categories.
I hope that helps!