Salesforce’s Spring 21 release has brought about a lot of big changes. Some I am not so thrilled with, but one has so far been nice to see.
Sandbox Source Tracking went GA with this release. This is meant to help us poor developers keep track of all metadata changes between our local VS Code source repositories and the actual Sandbox/Scratch orgs.
In a nutshell, it appears to me that the dreaded package.xml file will be going away, eventually. This file has caused far too many problems (especially for teams of developers). Instead of having to manually track all metadata data changes, Salesforce will automatically keep those changes synchronized between your local development workspace and the org. THANK YOU Salesforce!
Now before you get too excited, this is NOT going to be an easy transition. For starters, a force:source:pull will not get you all the metadata from an org. I experienced problems just trying to do a simple demo with a scratch org this past weekend, using brand new code.
I anticipate a lot of customers are going to experience huge problems as a result of this change. This will be especially difficult for legacy customers with huge monolith orgs that have not been untangled.
But, I do believe this step is necessary to allowing all Salesforce developers to really emerge from the 90’s and start doing serious modern web development. Before you go too far with this, you need to know what you are dealing with. Start by checking out this Developer Blog article. I am sure there will be lots more Trailhead modules/videos etc to come on this.
So, this is not some “magic pill” to solve all development/deployment problems. But, it is a good first step. Looking forward to seeing problems addressed and enhancements made.
saramorgan.net 
Thank you so much Sara, reading the article from Salesforce everything looks fantastic, but you got the real side of things.
Yes, I used to work for Salesforce, so I know that they kind of “have to” do it that way. Just one of the big reasons I prefer being independent. I only answer to myself.
Love your approach and your courses on Pluralsight, please keep developing them!!
Thanks so much!