You probably dont have enough context to have clarity here, but this release was to unblock performance and simplicity changes. We first needed to clean up 10 years of stagnant code from the years with a single maintainer, now we can remove the worse old decisions and only support node 18. Those changes could not land prior to this release in any form.

We have spent our time on those code changes, leaving nearly zero time for public relations on this, but I hope to start changing that soon. The main thing to take away here is this is a "boring release". It is to unblock more serious changes in v6 and for node core.