Yes. The "official release" is just so old as to be useless at this point. They should either update it or take it down and point people at github or something, IMO.
I use the latest version all the time. The newer renderer ("manifold", IIRC) is much faster, and there are newer facilities that make it possible to build 3MF files containing multiple objects for multi-color printing, though that takes a bit of thought to do correctly.
Yes everything this person said is correct. The Manifold backend is no joke, probably 100x faster.
To do multi-color printing it’s pretty easy now, just turn on the poorly named feature in preferences called “lazy-unions”. This will make it so that each top level object in your file gets exported as a separate subobject in the 3mf file.