Can you elaborate on your claim it’s not enough? PasS (platform as a service) has been transformative for modern infrastructure. Containers for better, or worse, have made deployments substantially “easier,” giving every org the ability to provide Heroku like services. But, Heroku provided this sort of ease, and more, long before containers ate the world. And regardless of containers themselves, I fail to see how something “more structured” would even exist. Deploy on push is still subject to being merged and everywhere I’ve worked has had no shortage of checks and approvals to merge.

That lacks imagination. There's no corporate workflow that can't ultimately translate to moving git tags.

Perhaps, but why should one do it when it's a bad model ? Jury because it's possible ?

How did you objectively decide it's a bad model?

Because it's more enterprise to open a Service Now ticket and have Joe from IT upload the new content using FTP.

I subjectively did based on my experience.

Except you want to track what went to production and what didn't and for how long

Releases of a Heroku app is tracked by the platform, and both shown the the UI, in the CLI and available in the API.

Git is remarkably good at tracking history. CI systems are also great at showing history.

I previously deployed stuff to Salesforce when I ran a very large Asia-Pacific Salesforce org.

The previous way (prior to SFDX which was clearly influenced by Heroku) was terrible. 12 hour long deploys that end when one unit test times out-style terrible. No code history terrible. There is no way that Heroku was worse for integration.

Whether they could have replaced APEX with Heroku is a different issue.