fix(release): ignore deleted projects in historical affectedness

[AI-JamesHenry]

Current Behavior

Nx Release evaluates historical commits against the current project graph and filesystem. If a historical commit touched a project configuration that no longer exists, the generic affectedness deletion fallback marks every current project as affected. In independent release groups, this can cause unrelated surviving projects to receive version bumps for commits belonging only to a retired project.

Expected Behavior

Historical release commit attribution disables only the conservative “project deletion affects every project” fallback. Other affectedness locators continue to run, and generic nx affected behavior retains its existing conservative default.

The change includes focused unit coverage for both the configurable fallback and continued locator execution, plus an end-to-end independent-release reproduction with a retired project.

Related Issue(s)

Fixes #33374

[netlify]

👷 Deploy request for nx-docs pending review.

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Name	Link
🔨 Latest commit	5ad319f

[netlify]

👷 Deploy request for nx-dev pending review.

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Name	Link
🔨 Latest commit	5ad319f

[nx-cloud]

View your CI Pipeline Execution ↗ for commit 5ad319f

Command	Status	Duration	Result
nx affected --targets=lint,test,build,e2e,e2e-c...	✅ Succeeded	15m 42s	View ↗
nx run-many -t check-imports check-lock-files c...	✅ Succeeded	4s	View ↗
nx-cloud record -- pnpm nx-cloud conformance:check	✅ Succeeded	1m	View ↗
nx build workspace-plugin	✅ Succeeded	<1s	View ↗
nx-cloud record -- nx sync:check	✅ Succeeded	18s	View ↗
nx-cloud record -- nx format:check	✅ Succeeded	5s	View ↗

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☁️ Nx Cloud last updated this comment at 2026-08-01 17:46:05 UTC

[nx-cloud]

Nx Cloud has identified a flaky task in your failed CI:

Since the failure was identified as flaky, the solution is to rerun CI. Because this branch comes from a fork, it is not possible for us to push directly, but you can rerun by pushing an empty commit:

git commit --allow-empty -m "chore: trigger rerun"
git push

View detailed reasoning in Nx Cloud ↗

🔔 Heads up, your workspace has pending recommendations ↗ to auto-apply fixes for similar failures.

_{🎓 Learn more about Self-Healing CI on nx.dev}