Ability to provide version to publish

We have a use case where we want to add CI/CD for internal feature development. As part of this, we want to allow developers developing features to publish "snapshot" versions for them to test in production. We also want to tie release builds to the commit they were built on.
Currently, it seems features have a hard requirement around semver versioning which makes this tricky for CI/CD to easily version. Ideally, we could call publish passing in the version to use which could be a short commit sha to use for the feature version.

Curious to hear if the semver requirement is needed or whether this can be relaxed to allow a version flag to be passed to publish to allow custom tagging/versioning of features.

Happy to submit a PR, but wanted to get some clarification around this use case before diving in.