Environments view as control center for deployment?

We are currently moving our deployment operation from a very old hudson server to gitlab-ci version 13.7 that we elf host on aws. In the new process that we are putting together we are opening the possibility for QA Analysts and Product Owners to push the deploy button when a release is cut and ready for production.

What we find is that unlike the tool we are migrating from there is not kind of control center for deployment where we can tell our colleagues, “here is the button, click on it, it will deploy”, the closest thing to it would be the environments view under operations but we are not sure it was meant for that and we are also thinking about building our own UI on top of the gitlab API that will provide actions (rollback, deploy), tracking (versions, stats, execution time, etc…)

Two questions before engaging in building such a UI:

1 - what is anyone doing with operations>environments view, is it relevant to a case like the one i have explained above? what is your experience with it? what are its limitations?

2- has anyone had to build specific UI on top of gitlab API, specially for the case of having a deployment control center? any feedback? pros and cons of doing that?

thanks in advance!