Apiary updates have become difficult & painful

[sofisl]

1. Recently, apiary updates have started failing, see our action log. Some of these were due to Node 18 see (fixes #3685, #3686), but others seem to mysteriously fail with "Unprocessable Entity".
2. The action often will result in a PR that looks fine, but when you go to merge it says: "This branch cannot be rebased". However it will not suggest the normal conflict-resolution suggestions, and so far the only way I have solved this is by manually-merging.
3. Release PRs must be merged via a Squash strategy for release-please, but generator PRs need to be merged via Rebase. Github just recommends the latest way of merging, and there are no restrictions/rules to this back-and-forth strategy changing.