How to handle large deployments using tools like gitlab and docker
The documentation shows that you can have 40+ branches with different configurations. You express concern that the configuration becomes large. With a good editor that isn't really a problem. Yet that feels wrong, right?

With git, in general, a repository per independent deployable works better than a single repository holding many independent deployables. So an alternative layout is not 1 repo with 40 branches, but 1+40 repos. That would be 1 repo that builds the latest code and creates releases. Then 40 repos that represent the configuration to deploy a particular release of the code configured for one website. The 40 repos that deploy the code can hold the 40 per-website configurations and a standardised build script that simply downloads the right release of the code to deploy along with the website configuration into the environment. 

We use 1+N+M git repos. We have 1 repo that holds the deploy scripts. They are versioned and released. We have N repos that build the different apps into releases. Currently, two php apps and two react apps that work together but are deployed and upgraded independently. Then M repos that represent the environments/sites we deploy into which is currently only staging and live. 

We are using k8s (OKD) and the deployment scripts are using helm. That just means that our deployment scripts and environment setup are simpler and rollback/downgrade is fully automated. We don't actually download the app to deploy during our build. Instead, we simply push out the docker registry tag of the version of the code we want to deploy into a given environment. 

I started a project to opensource our approach to deploying apps from git which is called OCD. It is still a work in progress but it demonstrates some of the above ideas.