FreePBX 17 and the new FreePBX distro have been the primary focus of engineering efforts now for a long time now. We expect to have a 17 beta tarball of OSS modules ready to share in the next week or two, and expect to have a Debian based distro to follow after that.
As has been stated previously, the main things addressed in 17 will be support for upcoming Asterisk macro removal, as well as support for PHP 8 and current versions of other services such as nodejs. When the beta drops, we’ll publish a blog with a list of what’s in store.