You just run the previous version of the production stack in your "dogfood/operations" stack. Once you've fully rolled out production and have vetted it, you can upgrade the other one to match production.

With large codebases maintained by many people, sometimes it's difficult to "just" do things like that. It's a bit weird to think that no one within that large group of professional developers hasn't thought of doing a simple obvious solution. It's probably not that simple.

Lots of comments here around that say "just do it like this: ...", or "why don't you: ... it'd be good because ..."

And then you get hit with a subtle bug that utterly nukes your system when the year changes from 2020 to 2021. Now you can't deploy anything because both systems are down. Given Github's scale and number of engineers it's basically guaranteed that they'll hit some sort of bug like that eventually. Not all bugs act immediately.