you thought youve found the og post ?
you fell for it, THUNDER CROSS SPLITO ATTACK !11
Check the changelog, there's a LOT more than just new lighting. Besides the 9 months of work reanimating the player, I also rewrote physics and collisions to be less buggy and more optimized, cleaned up animations on a number of enemies, added several new sound effects, added a new predator enemy to the game, completely rewrote enemy AI from scratch so they now consider a FOV cone/sound emmision with consideration towards obstructions/navigation code to follow the player around complex areas/gave them new moves, added a host of new sound effects, and plenty more all detailed in the changelog. The blind drake was temporairly removed because it would have taken longer to get its rework and the update had already been postponed long enough.
Patreon supporters are also the ones who choose which new features get worked on next - currently, they've voted on expanding some of the base mechanics and adding some new powerups. I have had new levels as a voting option the last few polls though. If you'd like to see new levels sooner, you can see about joining voting for those.
In general, my development plan has always been to solidify the foundation of the game as much as possible before developing more levels - reason being that things like platforming mechanics, enemy design, mechanic design, and more ALL change how a level should be designed. If I worked on new levels earlier, I would have had to throw away a significant portion of work due to how mechanics have changed throughout development. We're finally hitting the end of the foundation road though - besides the update I'm currently working on with more new base mechanics, I have I think just 2 or so more updates that don't specifically involve making more levels (one featuring the new blind drake and one featuring the beginning of the game's story mode).