Merge Request Required Information

Summary of Changes

.gitlab-ci.yml: upgade neetle early to workaround RHEL-17890 (#3847)
- Author: Alexander Todorov, Reviewers: Tomáš Hozza
README: remove IRC in favour of matrix channel (#3844)
- Author: Sanne Raymaekers, Reviewers: Achilleas Koutsou, Simon de Vlieger
Worker status heartbeat (#3766)
- Author: Sanne Raymaekers, Reviewers: Nobody
build(deps): bump actions/github-script from 6 to 7 (#3806)
- Author: dependabot[bot], Reviewers: Nobody
build(deps): bump the go-deps group with 5 updates (#3837)
- Author: dependabot[bot], Reviewers: Achilleas Koutsou
cloudapi/v2: fix verbiage of customizations (#3839)
- Author: Sanne Raymaekers, Reviewers: Diaa Sami
rpmbuild: add fedora-40 (#3838)
- Author: Jakub Rusz, Reviewers: Alexander Todorov
test: fix ansible playbook conditional statements error (#3845)
- Author: Xiaofeng Wang, Reviewers: Achilleas Koutsou
test: remove persistent log checking on minimal raw test (#3836)
- Author: Xiaofeng Wang, Reviewers: Achilleas Koutsou

— Somewhere on the Internet, 2023-12-13

Resolves: RHEL-1035