DB change management workflow

I’m curious how some manage database change workflow for large, complicated sites that are frequently optimized. My team has pretty well perfected an approach to code changes for EE in git, but database change management remains clunky (and db change deployment automation appears near impossible) – unless there are tools out there that I’m not aware of.

My hypothesis is that there must be a way to generate a series of queries that functionally would synchronize (1) production data backward and (2) stage db schema + data forwards in a predictable, automatable method. (perhaps I just need to take an even deeper dive on ee’s data model?)

A use case: a large EE5.3 website is in production. Its function is to support multiple authors posting multiple news stories a day. It has an ongoing planned optimization schedule where new channel schema and entry data will need to be introduced regularly to the data model in a DEV -> UAT approval workflow before being deployed to production (preferably, with automation…). The production DB is assumed to have entry data that must be preserved.

In Drupal 7, I’d use the “features” module to handle this sort of thing. But I don’t want to use Drupal..

Any advice or links to solutions would be appreciated. I’d also be willing to collaborate on the design/creation of a standards-based solution with others if there’s interest.