SquaredUp and Gitlab pipeline integration

As can be seen by a recent flurry of questions on my part, there is an enlightenment happening here! We were given a project to create a dashboard for Executive overview. What we noticed, outside of the other questions, is that there is no direct integration with Gitlab (or the like) where we can develop and then use the pipelines to push the JSON files to production.

My initial take is Dev Users with authority in DEV Team Folders, then insert some Gitlab process here to push to production. This also begs the question if it would be a cleaner option to leverage the SquaredUP Test license or have a DEV license where one can have many users on SquaredUP but none of that work occurs in a Production licensed instance. Thoughts?

Cheers