Our team has the following setup:
- "master" is our production branch, deployed to production environment
- "develop" is our development branch, deployed to development environment
- "release" is our release candidate (RC) branch, deployed to staging environment
We enabled Bitbucket's automatic merge feature and configured the branching model:

Our problem is that hotfixes on "master" are only being automatically merged into the "develop" branch, but not into the "release" branch.
The automatic merge into our RC worked when we were still creating "release" branches with a version in the name (e.g. "release/1.2.3"). But we decided to have a stable branch for the RC instead, so we don't have to create a new branch everytime we want to create a new RC.
Is there a workaround to make Bitbucket do the automatic merge of hotfixes into our RC although it can't determine an ordering for a branch named "release"?
We are still running Bitbucket 4.14.1, but (hopefully) it will be upgraded by our infrastructure department sometime soon...