Summary

Defense-in-depth follow-up to #427 (rolling dev tag rename). Two additions so the same shape of bug — a tag name colliding with a branch name, which made git fetch --tags fail and silently blocked every versioned release on main — can't silently recur.

• release.yml: run git fetch --tags --force --prune --prune-tags origin before semantic-release. semantic-release itself runs git fetch --tags unconditionally and aborts on any "would clobber existing tag" conflict, so force-pruning up front means a stray colliding tag recovers instead of blocking the release.
• ref-collision-check.yml (new): runs on push to main / dev, fails CI if any branch and tag share a name. Loud early signal instead of a silently-missing GitHub Release.

Neither change touches dev-release.yml — #427 already fixed the original collision by renaming the rolling tag to dev-latest, and v1.6.0 cut cleanly on 2026-04-13 with the tarball attached.

Test plan

• Merge; confirm the new Ref Collision Check job runs green on dev and main
• On the next dev → main merge, confirm Analyze & Release completes git fetch --tags --force and cuts a new versioned release
• (Optional manual test) push a tag named dev to a scratch branch; confirm Ref Collision Check fails with the offending name

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Chores
  • Added automatic validation to detect branch and tag name collisions in the CI/CD pipeline.
  • Enhanced release workflow with improved tag synchronization to ensure clean release processes.