Python Polars 1.8.2

🚀 Performance improvements

• Improve rename performace for Lazy API (#18890)
• Collapse cross-joins to faster joins (#18633)

✨ Enhancements

• Improve scalar strict message (#18904)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Properly zip struct validities (#18886)
• Out-of-bounds gather in categorical->int cast (#18897)
• AnyValue Series from Categorical/Enum (#18893)
• Properly cast AnyValue string (#18888)
• Fix SO in json inference (#18887)
• Use proper thread pool in cumulative_eval (#18885)

📖 Documentation

• Fix broken user-guide API links (#18872)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible!
@coastalwhite, @npielawski, @orlp, @ritchie46 and @siddharth-vi