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Yes, the correct way to prevent bloom from releasing packages it to use the <track>.ignore file.

An example is here: https://github.com/ros-gbp/geometry2-release/blob/master/noetic.ignored

There's an older question here with more details: https://answers.ros.org/question/66545/to-ignore-some-pkgs-upon-release-by-bloom/

For the tools for generating the changelog and preparing for the release. They are driven by the limitation of our common modern distributed source control systems that tags are cross cutting across the repo. As such if you tag a repo with a version, the assumption is that everything in that repo is at that version. It would be possible to extend the capabilities to ignore more. Or you might be able to stop the discovery with AMENT_IGNORE/CATKIN_IGNORE but I haven't confirmed that they are using the full abstraction which would honor those files.

However, even then, it seems to me it's unnecessary to rebuild some 10 packages every time I change just one of them...

It turns out that this cost is actually moderately low. And is likely incurred anyway if any of the changed packages have inter-dependencies which is often the case for closely maintained packages. I would generally suggest not worrying about this much.