I'm personally grateful for the periodic reminders. Keeping an eye on what's changed in all the applications I use is a lot of work, and I can let it slide when things get busy. I have specific communities for some things like browsers to alert me to some changes in the meantime, but for something like a password manager which probably doesn't have a thriving online community around it it's nice to know folks here are keeping an eye out for changes and updates.
Same goes for all software. Unless there's a significant change or upgrade in the release, why post? The Emacs post today made sense, because it introduced native compilation. That's a huge speed increase. Not merely bug fixes.
Yes. People see the name of the project and want to discuss the project in general*—not the minutiae of the latest release. This is a problem because most of that energy goes to the most popular, best-known projects, leading to repetitive discussion, which is the thing we most don't want here. It also crowds out lesser-known interesting stuff.
The solution we've arrived at over the years is to have a major thread when there's significant new information (on a popular topic) but downweight the others.
* Edit: here's an example from today's Emacs thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30932332. That was the top comment on the page just now, until I downweighted it. (Downweighting generic subthreads turns out to be one of the highest-leverage moderation thingies we can do to help thread quality.) It's a fine, perfectly good comment—but it's about $PROJECT in general, not anything new. Such comments are half the fun of HN but they need to not overwhelm discussions in order for things to stay fresh.
This also seems to happen quite a lot for Firefox on here, Dan. I'm a bit tired of seeing Firefox releases on the home page as (IMO) there's never much interesting about the new version. It's mostly just, as you put it above, people wanting to discuss the project in general.