We generally use "Publish later" to schedule article publishing in advance.

Also, we manually mark article statuses (only when significant changes are made).

As a result, we have to perform two separate bulk operations for every new version:

This leaves room for error, and also doesn't allow us to synchronize the status with the exact time of publication.

It would be much, much easier and more streamlined to include the article status option in the "Publish later" dialog, to synchronize status updates with the publication time.