I wrote a similar post more than a year ago shortly after the Kotlinconf 2018. Guess what, it feels like there was no progress at all.
I understand that there is lots of progress under the hood in improving and fixing underlying systems. Also I understand the importance of native and multiplatform, but they are quite niche currently. It might not be enough to keep people interested, certainly not enough for the classical JVM Backend Developer.
Compare it with Oracle’s information policy. They have outlined language features for the next 3-4 years. Those Java features are very exciting to talk about. See Jake Wharton’s Kotlinconf 19 talk for a comprehensive summary of new Java features in the next 3 years.
From jetbrains there is no information whatsoever. I don’t necessarily need to know when a feature will be available. But we don’t even know which KEEPs will be accepted. Those 2 KEEPs that @Wasabi375 linked to? We don’t even know whether Jetbrains wants to implement them, let alone what the time frame for them is. There is no official public word from Jetbrains other than some comments in some KEEPs that are often several years old.
Disclaimer: I am working on a project that uses multiplatform Kotlin JVM/JS with extensive use of coroutines, kotlinx-serialization and kotlinx-html libraries. All of those tools and libraries had great progress within the last year. IntelliJ integration also gets better for those regularly. I am very grateful for that. I just wish there were more exciting progress on the language level. Or at least some information openness similar to Oracle’s.