I think answer to the question in the title is no, since that is kind of the job of frontends like
Virtaal
Weblate
Poedit
Lokalize
Gtranslator

So you would use gettext with a versioned domain like myapp-1.0, if you need to know what keys are new/need updating, the translator compare versions in the frontend

But you also wrote a frontend, so yeah, I think you should release it

But I have little experience with i18n