Yes. The "official release" is just so old as to be useless at this point. They should either update it or take it down and point people at github or something, IMO.

I use the latest version all the time. The newer renderer ("manifold", IIRC) is much faster, and there are newer facilities that make it possible to build 3MF files containing multiple objects for multi-color printing, though that takes a bit of thought to do correctly.

Apparently the nightlies are the one to use. At least, they build it for Apple Silicon in those.

Yes, but the main downloads on the site are very old for some reason. Just get the nightly version instead, and then in Preferences -> Advanced -> Backend change it to “Manifold”. It will make your models “render” 10x faster (or more!).

The last release was 2021.01 but the GitHub repo seems to be recently updated. So I'd say... Maybe?

That said, there are often times software gets so stable that not having a new release for years is fine. Maybe this is one of them?

(I'm very new to OpenSCAD so I haven't run into bugs yet... But maybe it's pretty solid?)

Yes. https://github.com/openscad/openscad