release-please updates release PR version unexpectedly(?) after manual prerelease (e.g. 1.3.0 → 1.3.1-rc-SNAPSHOT)

**What I'm trying to do**
I'm using release-please with a minimal GitHub Action pipeline for a Maven project to manage stable releases, while our team handles prereleases (e.g. -rc) separately through a custom action.

We initially tried to manage both releases and prereleases entirely using release-please-action, but found it very complex to configure and ran into unexpected bugs and limitations with the prerelease strategy.
So, the goal now is to keep release-please responsible only for stable releases, and let our custom action handle prereleases independently.

**What code/setup I've tried**
Configured release-please in a simple setup for Maven to automate releases.
After releasing version 1.2.0, release-please correctly created a snapshot version 1.3.0-SNAPSHOT.
Then, our custom action manually created a prerelease version 1.3.0-rc.
On the next run, release-please updated the release PR version from 1.3.0 to 1.3.1-rc-SNAPSHOT, which breaks our intended versioning flow.

**What’s happening**
release-please appears to detect the manual prerelease (1.3.0-rc) and increments the patch version, leading to unexpected behavior in the release PR (1.3.1-rc-SNAPSHOT).
This causes confusion between prerelease and snapshot management and results in undesired version bumps.

**Error or unexpected behavior**
No error messages are thrown — the issue is with the unexpected version increment in the release PR after the manual prerelease.

**Question**
Is there a way to configure release-please to ignore manual prereleases (like -rc versions) or prevent it from bumping the next version (e.g., 1.3.0 → 1.3.1-rc-SNAPSHOT) when such prereleases exist?
If not, what would be the recommended approach to integrate release-please with a separate prerelease process safely?