Could we establish a “NEWS.md” or “RELEASE-NOTES.md” file that each PR has to modify (add a line under the Development versions) and its the reviewers responsibility to check that happens. Example: Notify parallel (or other pkg) about SIGCHLD by gaborcsardi · Pull Request #237 · r-lib/processx · GitHub
On release “Development version” becomes Repo version X.Y.Z
I think its the cleaner and easier to handle than sections in PR or issue comments.
We can also use the current release-notes.txt and move it to the .md format.
It might be worth a try for the next release and we then revisit it after.