IDE 1.8.12 was forced out quickly without warning after issues with 1.8.11 - by surprise and no usual warning. It seems Paul's on task with some hardware and such.
He got this out in 4 hours on 2/13 - but the Beta release seems perfectly usable - and without reports of issues showing it is probably ready but that takes time and if something shows up after in Teensy or the IDE … that forces another sooner than expected release … so Paul's doing all the calculus on that.
I'm considering whether to release 1.51 now, as it is... or to merge a number of contributions and spend the next week on a couple widely requested features... which would require a couple more weeks of testing.