Ask HN: Am I releasing code artifacts or docker images?

At our company we use java with maven and Jenkins to build our components (Spring boot fat jars), push them to a private maven repo and then build a docker image of that build and push that to a private docker repo. We do this for every build.

Our docker images get auto promoted to our dev environment and later manually promoted to QA, UAT and PROD if passing all tests (Both automated and manual). We do not want to rebuild the docker image at any point past the first time.

Now, since any of the builds can ultimately become the prod release, depending on passing all tests, does that mean every maven build should also do a maven release?

I instinctively know they are two separate releases but I am tempted to just start thinking in terms of docker images rather than code artifacts.