Recent research on beaconing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is increasingly focused on adaptive and context-aware beaconing mechanisms designed to maintain cooperative awareness among vehicles while preventing channel congestion and redundancy. Key advancements include dynamic adjustment of beacon transmission rate, power, and contention window based on real-time traffic density, vehicle speed, and road environment, thereby ensuring fresh vehicle awareness with minimal overhead. Cross-layer designs are being explored where beaconing parameters are tuned by considering both MAC-layer metrics (e.g., channel busy ratio) and application requirements (e.g., safety vs. infotainment). Moreover, alternative strategies challenge the traditional periodic beaconing model by investigating event-driven and threshold-based beacon emission, especially in high-density or highway scenarios where continuous beaconing may add more overhead than benefit. These developments aim to strike a balance between timely situational awareness and efficient use of wireless resources in highly dynamic vehicular environments.