Emmanuele Bassi commented:
I think we have consensus that the next release will be GNOME 40 rather than GNOME 3.40, though. @ebassi, was this proposed to desktop-devel@ and is it finalized?
At the last release team call we decided to wait until 3.38 was close to its release—and I was on PTO until this Monday. The Discourse thread was advertised on d-d-l, but I guess we need to formalise the decision.