Updating CFN stack over multiple accounts

A customer is implementing a multi-account deployment strategy (account 1 for DEVO, account 2 for UAT, account 3 for Production) using CFN templates to provision their infra as code

The deployment process includes the typical deploy/validate/promote workflow where a new version of the CFN template should be validated in a DEVO environment before promoting it to UAT and so on

My initial approach was using CFN StackSets and it works nice on stack creation time but when it comes to stack update, it seems to be impossible to control when/where to deploy the new version of the template (i.e. "Updating a stack set always touches all stack instances") so I can not validate a stage deployment before promoting to the next stage (probably target account gates lambdas can make the trick but looks to me like a lot of additional complexity)

I would expect having something like update-stack-set without updating the existing stack instances and allowing me to perform an account by account update of the stack after proper validation is performed

The alternative solution I am exploring is using cross-account roles to target individual accounts using CFN update-stack (hence ignoring stacksets)

Any experience on similar requirement?