There is a bit of a trend in languages to shift towards more formal semantics. In the C/C++ world, the relaxed memory model and the pointer provenance work are being heavily driven by actual formal semantics model. And many newer languages seem to rely on a more overtly operational semantics description (Java and JavaScript come to mind), although the C and C++ standards themselves are largely free of this. I definitely would like to see formal semantics be defined by the standards, although this is difficult because they still don't exist in complete form, and I'm not sure many committee members have an ability to read or reason about formal semantics very well.

I think the commentary about the atomics memory model kind of not working as intended is useful to note. Consume is useless in practice, and there are probably better railings that could have been put around acquire/release semantics.

I'll have to listen to several of the other talks.