How can I automate republishing?

Jakob_CGK

As it currently stands, BC requires all apps with dependencies to another app to be unpublished before it's possible to update it, making us either have to unpublish multiple apps manually or unpublishing and publishing every custom extension through a hardcoded sequence of PS-commands. I find this very tedious and inflexible, especially since the automation scales very poorly with each additional app.
I've been trying to find a way to fully automate the detection of the correct sequence of extensions, unpublishing them in that order and republishing them again. BCContainerHelper already has commands for unpublishing, publishing, and even sorting a string of app names by dependencies, but I can't figure out how I am supposed to retrieve that string in the first place.
Does anyone know where to get a string listing all extensions of an OnPrem server? Or is there an even simpler way to handle republishing multiple apps?