ci: remove auto-merge, release-from-develop, tag-and-release workflows and VERSION file

[Amnoor]

Summary

This PR removes the three downstream automation workflows introduced in ci/dependabot-auto-release — auto-merge-dependabot.yml, release-from-develop.yml, and tag-and-release.yml — along with the VERSION file they depended on. The Dependabot configuration itself (.github/dependabot.yml) is retained so that Dependabot continues to open Docker base image update PRs against develop; only the automated downstream handling of those PRs is being removed.

The workflows are being removed because the level of automation they provided — auto-merging Dependabot PRs, auto-creating release branches, auto-tagging, and auto-publishing GitHub Releases — is unnecessary for this project and operated without sufficient maintainer visibility and control. Releases will continue to be created manually from the existing deployment.yml workflow, which triggers on v* tag pushes to main.

Files Changed

Added:

• None

Modified:

• None

Deleted:

• .github/
  • workflows/
    • auto-merge-dependabot.yml
    • release-from-develop.yml
    • tag-and-release.yml
• VERSION

Key Changes

• Deleted .github/workflows/auto-merge-dependabot.yml — removed the workflow that automatically enabled auto-merge (merge commit strategy) on any Dependabot PR carrying the dependencies label, eliminating unattended merges into develop.
• Deleted .github/workflows/release-from-develop.yml — removed the workflow that triggered on develop pushes by dependabot[bot], extracted the Node.js version and SemVer, constructed a release/v<semver>-<node_version> branch, and opened an automated PR to main via peter-evans/create-pull-request@v5.
• Deleted .github/workflows/tag-and-release.yml — removed the workflow that triggered on every push to main, created an annotated Git tag, and published a GitHub Release via actions/create-release@v1.
• Deleted VERSION — removed the 1.0.0 plain text SemVer source-of-truth file that release-from-develop.yml and tag-and-release.yml depended on to construct release tag names.