Ah but I have made announcement days before feature freeze. Even just hours and mins before the tag. I could delay it long for them for it to be properly QAed before tagging it for release if they informed me earlier. Everytime we delay RC. We shorten the time for bug hunts or we push the release date. Giving the releng enough lead time to decide. If you put someone on the spot, this the most obvious answer is no. I cannot be certain or not it will screw the entire release. If it renders core features useless it would be worse than not making a release at all. The feature is important but not critical. It could have been added to a maintenance release later.

I am a release engineer. I was recently bullied into adding new features without going thru QA after I cut the code to RC. The senior web engineer threatened that if I don't do it he will. When I complained that to my manager. He defended that he was under stress and I should let him commit the code. I'm not sure I want to work there anymore. Seriously, have a bad manager can be demoralising

Are you kidding? Partial Differential Equations are used to simulate effect of ocean waves, zebra stripes, noise filters, rigid bodies, image compression ... Just because you don't use them doesn't mean the rest of us don't