Automating notebook evaluation

Question

I have several notebooks that cover various facets of our firm.

Each notebook queries a database, generates graphs, and uses Export[] to produce individual graphs (as .PNG) and ultimately a .PDF of the whole notebook.

I want to trigger the evaluation of these notebooks using cron on *nix or, on Windows, with Scheduled Tasks.

What's the recommended route here? What is state of the art in notebook automation?

I see some (years old) questions with answers that allude to setting initialization cells and options, which trigger evaluation of the notebook by merely opening it, which can be automated. This I understand.

One downside of initialization cells is manually opening the notebook, to edit and improve it, would cause it to immediately generate graphs which would trigger premature downstream publishing processes like rsync to update graphs until notebook evaluation is aborted by the user.

Is there a potentially better way in modern Mathematica? We use Version 13.

For example I can see using a master initialization-cell notebook with commands like NotebookOpen[] and NotebookEvaluate[] to iterate each notebook in turn. I haven't found anything related to this in my context, and I'd like to avoid too much research-oriented development at this stage.

How are cool kids automating daily Mathematica tasks these days?

(I'd like to add "cron" and "scheduled-tasks" tags to this question, but I don't possess sufficient karma to do that because those would be new tags.)