For anybody who is not up to the mark, the work in the direction of the Merge, i.e. the transition to PoS, has progressed dramatically within the final yr. There have been two main present testnets which were merged in the previous couple of months, and Goerli would be the final one to bear the transition from PoW to PoS.
Within the meantime, Ethereum Mainnet has been shadow-forked 9 occasions already, most just lately immediately. These are successfully parallel chains that comply with the true blocks that are available in on Mainnet, and permit the builders to imitate what the true load will appear like following the precise Merge.
Once more, it is a tentative schedule. If even that. The Goerli Merge might go terribly flawed and uncover main flaws within the Merge transition mechanism*, so proceed with cautious optimism. The Merge is coming.
* The Merge is in contrast to any common hard-fork: it is primarily based on the mining issue, not on the block peak. When the community hits a terminal whole issue (TTD), the present PoW consensus might be hot-swapped over to the PoS consensus shoppers. All within the span of 1 block.