Normally we update Subnautica's experimental branch several times per day, and default branch every few weeks. Experimental branch is a buggy, horrible, experimental mess. Generally, updates to default branch are a Big Thing. For example, last week we released base building.
After the base release, several people on the team were keen to put out a quick, small update to address some issues they really wanted to fix for default branch players as soon as possible. Today, we released that update on Steam. We don't normally do this because there's significant testing, promotion, and planning overhead with releasing updates to default branch.
For this update, we've skipped most of that overhead. There's a risk we might have broken something pretty badly. If we have, please let us know. We can always revert default branch back to last week's base building update.
Annoyingly, our checkin-and-changes system went down over the weekend. This means it's very hard for us to tell you exactly what changed in this update. You can see some of what changed by looking at the 'B51 Done' column on our Trello board. Many changes relate to bases - For example, mouse-click behaviour on hatches is less wacky, and base pillars now no longer float out in the middle of the world.
This kind of update is unusual and we don't plan on doing them regularly in future. After today you can expect that we'll continue updating experimental (often) and default (occasionally with big updates) as we always have!