Evaluate the requirements to deploy release environment to old stable branches

Note: From the result of this evaluate, we knows that the gitlab-assets-ee image may get clean up after 14 days, so deploying a commit older than 14 days may result in a failure and require a fix. We don't see that in the 3 newest minor versions because we release a new patch release every 1-2 weeks.

We have the idea to create a new release environment from an old stable branch ( #20019). However, it may not be possible due to various reasons. One of them is the old artifacts/images got cleaned up.

An example:

• The pipeline requires registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/gitlab-assets-ee (e.g. failed pipeline).
• However, this image is cleaned up after 14 days https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/settings/packages_and_registries/cleanup_image_tags

Implementation Hints

I think the pipeline is very complex and we cannot list all requirements. Thus, I suggest we just try to deploy a pretty old minor stable branch (i.e. 16.1) and address all the issues that happen during the process.

Major releases bring dramatical changes, so IMO it is acceptable to skip trying to deploy a version that is in an older major version (e.g. if we are at 17.1, it is acceptable to say we cannot support 16.8).

Exit Criteria

• A list of issues happening when deploying an old stable branch is documented in this issue.
• Follow-up issues are created from the above list.