Does having a lower level of quality on develop hinder your ability to actually release code?

We have one particular repo at work that is just a pain in the ass to work with (Typescript analytics code that has to be backwards compatible to about forever), and we've pretty much abandoned the develop branch since releases got held up due to bugs in less important features that had been merged in without comprehensive testing. Pretty much everything now gets tested extensively on a feature branch and then gets merged directly into a release branch.

We might have swung a little too far in the other direction, I'm thinking we want to at least merge well tested bits back onto develop, but at least we can release the features that are actually done and cut those that are still having issues without having to do any major git surgery.