For the past few years the performance work (e.g. commit graph) has made a huge difference for large/fast moving repos. They're big enough to be productivity enhancements for some people: when we merged our Android-like multi-repo setup into a proper mono-repo we required updating git because things like git status/git commit/git log could take minutes without the recent perf fixes.

It pays to follow the release notes because some of these features are opt-in (e.g. commit graph is still optional).

The sparse checkout stuff is great but still too low-level for us to use, but it's laying the groundwork for something good.