I notice 0.18 is still latest in npm. that expected?

Yes, I did that on purpose because we need to do some integration validation across all the express repos before I am comfortable with new installs getting this. I did link locally but the test were flaky (see the edit history of the PR to express lol) and so I was worried maybe it was something up with this, but then all the tests passed in CI and locally it seemed to have been a fluke (why I could not find) but I didn't want to go all in since this is an easy way to "soft release" the new major since I think it is actually solid.