The lay of the land when mountains move: Beta decay today

Hand in hand with several new experimental results many years in the making, substantial theory progress has changed the precision beta decay landscape in the last years. As experiments stand at the precipice of a new order of magnitude in precision, a further expanded collaboration with theory has resulted in a reevaluation of a number of inputs using state-of-the-art methods. Whereas several nuclear ab initio methods are maturing into the mass $A$=10-20 region, new radiative corrections have revived tension with top-row CKM unitarity. Meanwhile, advances in lattice QCD are opening new channels for model-independent Beyond Standard Model searches. We present a brief sketch of the current landscape in CKM unitarity tests, exotic current searches and the neutron lifetime and look ahead towards compelling cases for both theoretical and experimental study.