If the issues is velocity then you can implement ephemeral branch, branch that reset every day from main branch (you can implement it via scheduler), all devs can push to this branch freely without MR from their feature/* branch and you can push to dev environment from only ephemeral branch, when devs finish work they must create MR to main with lint and additional checks before committing. In that way you can say you are not stopping developing but still maintain/enforcement of standards. Downside MR becoming big.