During the past few weeks there have been more visual design improvements landing for the Cinnamon desktop, such as a new default theme and enhancing dialogs and more. A lot of polishing around Cinnamon remains ongoing.
Linux Mint developers have also been busy working on Aptkit and Captain, their recently announced fork of some Debian APT components . With Linux Mint 22.1 in December they are planning to no longer depend on aptdaemon / synaptics / gdebit / apturl.
More details on these efforts via the Linux Mint blog .