Java 17: A Different Version?

I just have trouble with this idea that, oh, Java 16, it's got the same number bump as Java 17, but Java 17 is very different. And so if I really want, I don't know, pattern matching, if that's an important feature for me, wouldn't I want the more sophisticated one? How do you let people know what they're getting into? It's a hard problem. Like in the Scala ecosystem, you have to opt into language features that are experimental. In some cases, you can do that through an import. But how do you actually have a release that people will try it?