Hello, one of the coders and author of the auto deployment system here.
After Fire and Dice from the 2022 jam, we looked into automating build and upload since it was pretty stressful that year with Itch being quite unreliable at the last hours. I wrote a GitHub action script which does building for all platforms, a web build, does a publish to GitHub pages and uploads to Itch as long as you set the butler credentials secret var and set a game.config.json file which points to where on Itch it should upload. You can see the build script here: https://github.com/Chocobois/built-to-scale/blob/main/.github/workflows/deploy.y...
So to answer your question, the last publish happened 4 minutes before the deadline.
On tasks, it's a very flat structure, we're just a group of friends in a server who happen to be a bunch of artists, producers and programmers pooling our experiences together. First we brainstorm the game on Discord, then we just pick tasks depending on what we feel like doing. Merge conflicts are easily avoided by just committing often, the goal is that the game builds, the code doesn't necessarily have to be fully implemented.
On how we bootstrap the project, same reason as from the 2022 jam, we needed to move quicker, so we made a template: https://github.com/Chocobois/choco-jam-template , just click the "Use this template" button and clone it. It comes with Vite, Phaser, Neutralino and TypeScript set up, it's all documented in the README.