@Srfaye327,
There's probably a post somewhere about the process. For some time now (years?), the practice is to roll out the update over time. I've been a user who gets the update quickly, and other times not for several days. It drives me a little nuts.
Also, the Welcome to Premiere Pro xxx is always delayed by some amount. Today, a search on the forum for "welcome to " finds lots of welcome to pages, but the latest is 25.5. I can think of many reasons this might be so, but it makes is hard to get an answer to your question.
I still believe the best practice is not to update until the "Welcome to" announcement comes out. And if you have a particular bug that is important to be fixed, ask in a thread for it and find out if somewhere has tested it. As a forum helper, I try to update quickly and test the bugs I am following to help users like yourself.
The masking is interesting. Projects with masking enabled are a new project version. If masking is not enabled, I wonder if it will be the older project version. That's what happened in the Beta.
And finally, as to your crashing, when I update, I reset preferences, cache, and plugin loading cache, and then create a new project to test basic functioning.
Stan
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