feat(release)!: release graph aware filtering, updateDependents can now be "always"

[JamesHenry]

When release groups changed to become more flexible and powerful, with updateDependents tracing across any number of transitive release groups, the logic for filtering (e.g. --projects and --groups on the CLI) was never updated to reflect this new dynamism and complexity.

Now in this PR, release graph construction has been fully separated out from the release-group-processor. It now lives in the new ReleaseGraph. This is also now where filtering takes place so that the filters can be fully graph aware.

There is additionally a new always option available for updateDependents in addition to auto and never which are unchanged. always means that a project's dependents will be updated wherever they may live in the graph, regardless of whether or not they were directly included within a project or graph filter. We feel that this is what people want most of the time so this is also going to become the default in a follow up breaking change PR. In order to be easier to review, and to increase confidence in this refactor, this PR does not yet make that change to leave as many tests as possible untouched (other than utilities changing).

BREAKING CHANGE: The signature of init() on VersionActions has changed, it no longer accepts a second argument. Validation of the manifest files, if any, now takes place via a separate method (validate()) call after construction of the new ReleaseGraph. For the most part, users do not need custom VersionActions so only a small percentage of consumers should be impacted.

Fixes #31273

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☁️ Nx Cloud last updated this comment at 2025-10-08 13:21:47 UTC

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