While everyone covered Drupal 12's removal list, the release that actually halved query counts vs 11.3 shipped five months earlier with far less attention. Here's what 11.4 actually changed under the hood — Brotli, the new dr CLI, argon2id, and the benchmark numbers Drupal.org published.
A customer's fat-payload queue jobs took seconds to reserve, not milliseconds — and it had nothing to do with row count. Here's what the GitHub issue actually showed, the index that fixed it, and why MySQL has to read a column you never sort on.
Drupal 11.3.0 bakes HTMX into core and rebuilds BigPipe on top of it, with claims of up to 71% less JavaScript and 26-33% more requests served at the same database load. I went through the release notes to see what that means for anyone who still writes #ajax callbacks, and whether Navigation is actually worth switching to yet.
