Having done just a small to moderate amount of automation in CI/CD pipelines around GPG tools I know this pain. Back then I was waiting for https://sequoia-pgp.org/ which recently (Dec 2024) released its v1.0 of the sq CLI which seemed to have a lot of promise of fixing the strange and inconsistent ergonomics of using the gpg tools.
On this note I would check out the Universal Blue project[1] which uses a combination of technologies to implement an immutable OS desktop environment.