  We consider the problem of minimizing a differentiable function with locally
Lipschitz continuous gradient over the real determinantal variety, and present
a first-order algorithm designed to find stationary points of that problem.
This algorithm applies steps of a retraction-free descent method proposed by
Schneider and Uschmajew (2015), while taking the numerical rank into account to
attempt rank reductions. We prove that this algorithm produces a sequence of
iterates the accumulation points of which are stationary, and therefore does
not follow the so-called apocalypses described by Levin, Kileel, and Boumal
(2022). Moreover, the rank reduction mechanism of this algorithm requires at
most one rank reduction attempt per iteration, in contrast with the one of the
$\mathrm{P}^2\mathrm{GDR}$ algorithm introduced by Olikier, Gallivan, and Absil
(2022) which can require a number of rank reduction attempts equal to the rank
of the iterate in the worst-case scenario.
