Working with a larger corporate. They are planning on opening a second pipeline for a hybrid mobile app. This second pipeline will be for hotfixes straight into production. My gut feeling is that this is a bad smell and what should really happen is more shift-left, better code quality/testing and feature flagging hiding the code/features that are not yet ready. This keeps one pipeline and means its the same process to release for features as it is for hotfixes.
Their concern with this approach is that releasing half finished code (even hidden) into production could open them to liability/bad pr from people who find it and interpret it the wrong way. I am thinking we run the compilation process so that the feature flags stops code even going into the production version of the app.
My question is, do other pragmatic people with real experience in a large (~10k employees) corporate use a second pipeline? If you don't have a second pipeline, what is the best evidence to build a case for change (I tried looking in the devops handbook and doing some googling but no really authoritative statements I could find)?