Short of it is: Whenever there is a Reflect 9, it will have paid versions only. 8 Free will get patches until Jan 2024, but won't officially support any future versions or build upgrades of Windows.

I figure that Macrium's last freeware distribution will still work for most HD/SSD cloning, for now, but I wondered if a spiritual successor had arisen yet? Hard to believe that it's been 2 years.

The latest edition of Macrium Reflect fixes a couple of major issues. The first one is related to disk image failures where users reported an "Invalid Function" error, while the second is an AVX bug.