Sync/release with release candidate

[r4mmer]

Motivation

What was the motivation for the changes in this PR?

Acceptance Criteria

• Include here all things that this PR should solve

Checklist

• If you are requesting a merge into master, confirm this code is production-ready and can be included in future releases as soon as it gets merged
• Make sure either the unit tests and/or the QA tests are capable of testing the new features
• Make sure you do not include new dependencies in the project unless strictly necessary and do not include dev-dependencies as production ones. More dependencies increase the possibility of one of them being hijacked and affecting us.