LibreOffice 24.8.4, optimised for the privacy-conscious user, is available for download - The Document Foundation Blog

Probably to position themselves in relation to Microsoft offerings eager to siphon as much user data as possible for their own ratty "AI" and passing the rest off to third parties?

This, 100%.

I recently started using Linux as my daily driver and I needed to make a step-by-step procedure with screenshots for a client, so I figured I would create a document in Writer and export it as a PDF.

It was constantly hanging every time I would insert a couple of images and I would have to kill it and lose my progress to get it to close.

In the end, I ended up creating the file using Google Docs and it went as smooth as can be