I don't work on mission-critical software

wondering what my alternate deployment routes are

If the stakes are low and you don't have any specific need for a persistent registry then you could skip it entirely and push images to production from wherever they are built.

This could be as simple as `docker save`/`scp`/`docker load`, or as fancy as running an ephemeral registry to get layer caching like you have with `docker push`/`docker pull`[1].

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79758446/3625