I think maybe we are using semantic release wrong at my company, but no one really knows the right way to use it. We have an alpha branch that creates releases with alpha tags at the end of the version. Every so often, we merge the master branch into the alpha branch to keep them in sync since not everything goes through the alpha branch before it gets released. However, recently we had a breaking-change commit in master that got merged into alpha, and semantic-release saw that, causing a new major alpha version to be generated. It seems to me that the alpha branch shouldn't ever generate any releases based on commits coming in from master, but maybe we are approaching this wrong entirely?
Here's the merge commit that caused all the trouble: https://github.com/opentripplanner/otp-ui/commit/58c65535b6e7371a8c5bfdf532fc583b189a97a1
