You should already be using continuous integration, so it should already be moot.

Continuous integration also needs a server to run on. The point is, if you have a dev laptop running M1 ARM and a prod server running Intel x86, you need something in the middle to build/test on unless you want to cross-compile on your laptop and yeet it to production.

QEMU with TCG can do wonders. It's not perfect but it's surprisingly fast and emulates a good amount of instructions, can do SMP, etc.

Easy: push it to a preproduction server first.

Boot in qemu, or have a test instance.

Perhaps on a staging server?