Regarding chromium specifically, I promoted the latest stable version to the stable channel today (see call for testing), and prior to that it had been in the candidate channel for 6 days, to allow for actual user testing and feedback (of which there hasn’t been this time around, but there usually is).
I’m usually on top of the chromium updates and I keep all the channels up-to-date. The perception of lagging behind recently is I think a combination of EOY holidays + build farm outages (chromium is quite a beast to build). We are now back to normal.