It's a once a month / once a quarter occurance. I'm not sure if it's because of changes to the webservice or not enough financial backing.
I've basically given up on using early access pijul. I've had a problem with each of the last three versions, primarily pushing to Nest. It wouldn't be an issue if I could install pijul on NearlyFreeSpeech (because then I could self host on a known good version). I want pijul to succeed, its patching model sounds good. Clearly, it's working for some group of people. But I'm not one of them, and it's past where I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'll try again when they're v1.0