But do any of these features progress the language or provide any performance benefits? Most read as syntactic-sugar (I understand Ruby is about developer happiness) and unnecessary.
They progress the language by adding syntactic sugar. Many Ruby programmers aren't waiting around for Ruby to suddenly become fast. If that happened it'd be great, but most code I write isn't performance critical, so it's okay if they just give me a feature where i can write `user&.name` instead of `user && user.name`