.... and why it’s lagging behind on releases?

Mainly, it's lagging because the project manager called it quits not long before the release of perl-5.34.0.
Things are now looking much brighter.

There's an experimental build of perl-5.36.0 (sp536_20230311.zip) available.
It's a portable build and not yet fully featured, but everything you want may well be there. (I've found it to be fine for my purposes, so far.)
Just download the file, extract it into C:\, and then rename the top level folder from "sp536_20230311" to "strawberry". (This will not be a permanent requirement, but is recommended for this experimental release.)
To use it, you can double-click on C:\strawberry\portableshell.bat and use the cmd.exe shell that pops up.

See https://github.com/StrawberryPerl/Perl-Dist-Strawberry/releases/tag/dev_20230311, and report any issues not covered by the stated caveats therein to https://github.com/StrawberryPerl/Perl-Dist-Strawberry/issues.

Cheers,
Rob