Congrats for a new improved version!
I have one question though: what is the policy concerning creating new features vs fixing bugs? Now you have adressed both new features and bugfixes in the same branch. However, new features can also introduce new bugs and also it can be critical to not have to wait on bugfixes because of new features in the pipeline.
Could there be a developing policy where there will be a minor branch which only accepts bugfixes like a 4.3.1 and a major branch which accepts both those bugfixes and new functionality like a 4.4? For example, there were blocking issues with the azure blob storage which was a bug. However, the fixes for that are still not available until 4.4 is release with new functionality which also introduce a risk.
Short: there should/could be bugfix versions while having a major release with new functionality. Thanks for taking this into consideration and giving some feedback/insights on this.
Keep on the good work, I'm a proud user of the platform.