There was no staging-next at that point. It got merged to master about 1 day before the unbound PR got opened. Some very critical fixes were merged directly to master in the past, but that won’t speed up getting the fixes into the big channels too much in comparison to the usual process. (it speeds up the -small channels)
Note that the rebuilds are expensive for the infra. One staging* cycle takes 2 weeks, and almost all of that is blocked by waiting for the infra to process everything. And right now, we’re supporting 3 different branches at once (!) (unstable/master, 26.05 and 25.11), so the worst-case lag is more than 3*2 weeks. Though the overlap only lasts for a few weeks, but even without it there’s about 1 month worst case.