I have to say most recent version bumps seemed pretty minor to me. Is the team gathering steam to release something bigger?

(I know about GATs but IMO that would take a while to be picked up by the community and made a good use of. Correct me if I am wrong, please.)

Each release being small is a feature, not a shortcoming.

Rust encourages developers to stick to the latest Rust compiler. Almost all application developers update their compilers every six weeks. This is easier if the changes introduced by each release are small. Even though Rust takes its 1.0 compatibility promise very seriously, bugs still happen. These bugs are easier to report, triage and fix in Rust's model.

So it's not just recent releases that seem small. It's been that way for at least a couple of years now.

Nice