According to this article: Memory Alpha has premiere dates for these installments listed as April 25 and May 2. Have these dates been officially confirmed, or is this an MA editor taking "after Discovery wraps its second season" a little too literally? I tend to think these are just placeholder dates, because otherwise wouldn't they have announced the episode titles/synopses and released a trailer by now? If they're still happening, now would really be the time to promote these, to keep people from immediately canceling CBSAA now that Discovery is done for the year.
Yeah, those are placeholder dates. They'll definitely hype them whenever they do announce the release date. Since there's no new Trek until the Fall, I think the shorts won't show up til Summer
Animation takes time. Lower Decks was written concurrently to The Picard Show but won't appear for years after. Even though they're only 15 minutes, it's gonna take longer to animate a Short Trek than to film and do post-production on live-action.
True, but it doesn't necessarily have to take years, it's not like this stuff is all hand-drawn anymore. A 30 minute episode of Archer takes ten weeks to produce according to this interview. And I doubt Kurtzman would have told THR that the episodes would air in the spring if they were really going to take years.