We have the following git branch structure for our helm templates (rolled out with argocd):

stage/dev

stage/test

stage/prod

Each branch containing all values.yaml files (values-dev, values-test, values-prod).

This means that our current workflow for changing something in the values-prod.yaml file, is to edit values-prod in stage/dev, and then merge through stage/test to stage/prod.

This generates a lot of overhead for us, when we simply want a small change in the prod env.

What would be the best approach, to keep stage specific changes simple (not merging through all branches) but still being able to merge global changes through branches?

I mean we could just simply create a feature branch of the stage we want, to edit the value, but that would result in different states between each branch, which could potentially lead to confusion.