"Zero new features" was a nice marketing line for Snow Leopard. It did not reflect reality. Snow Leopard introduced Dock Exposé, Exchange support in Apple Mail, and Grand Central Dispatch. just to name three.
We've had similar releases since then which added a few new features but were primarily focused on stability. The most recent one was High Sierra. These do tend to be the best releases of macOS IMO.
Well, we're also downplaying it a little bit, as component stack traces in production or fixing event delegation semantic across roots are significant new compelling use cases. :-)
But yeah, I'm mostly just referring to quality-of-life improvements as being a focal point of the release.
I wish macOS / iOS / iPadOS would have a version without tons of new features.