You may have heard of a variety of Drupal 8 initiatives during the development cycle leading up to Drupal 8.0.0 being released in 2015. These were officially recognized efforts to get a variety of big changes into Drupal 8, and included projects such as configuration management, Views in core, and multilingual improvements. A lot of work from those initiatives is now part of Drupal 8. Not everything got in though, and as time moves on some priorities for new work will always shift.