For the argument at hand (Can you deploy anything on a production server from a third party that is only verified cryptographically?) signatures and hashes fulfill the same function (and btw I also wrote "verifying it against a hash or signature" above). More to the point, under the hood GPG signatures only sign a hash of the file in question anyway. Verifying a file via a GPG signature is strictly less secure than verifying it by its hash (assuming you use the same hash function as the signature).