What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different chainset designs?
144mm: supported chainsets such as 52/42 with relatively narrow range freewheels
130mm: allowed a range such as 52/39, as freewheel (then cassette) range expanded
74mm: necessary to add a smaller ring, e.g., 30t on a road triple
110mm: this supports anything down to 33t, hence this was introduced for Shimano FC-R700 around 2005 as their first compact chainset, i.e. 50/34

Oddity:

92mm BCD was introduced for Dura-Ace triple 7703 https://www.sheldonbrown.com/dura-ace.html - the Dura-Ace was different, and 30t ring attached to the middle ring. This propagated to 7803, but thereafter Dura-Ace triple was deleted because compacts were standard

MTB:

94mm + 58mm BCD - were introduced in the early 1990s for MTB chainsets, to reflect a MTB triple , e.g. 44/32/22
104 + 64mm BCD - replaced the above with e.g., 42/32/24
96 + 64mm BCD introduced with M782 Deore XT 40/30/22. Improved the chainline for the 30t chainring compared with 104mm which works better with a 32, but not so well with 30t https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/what-is-that-pointless-shimano-96bcd-standard-for/
4-bolt chainrings were introduced with XTR M950 in 1996. For a while there were a choice of 5-bolt &amp; 4-bolt MTBs chainset, but eventually this went to all 4-bolt
Direct mount is now a thing, and this reduces weight and makes things different again


Here the chainring fits directly onto the arm, so there is no BCD per se (although there are double direct mount chainsets, in which case a second chainring bolts onto the first)

One point not yet addressed is marketing. Bicycle companies are on an increasingly aggressive release schedule - and this is not true only of marketing. Whereas a consumer product sold in the 1950s might still be sold a decade or more later, this is bad for sales, in that if you have a high-quality, durable bicycle or other consumer product for which spare parts are readily available, there is no reason to buy a new one.
Therefore by releasing products that look radically different from the old ones, you mark the old ones out as old-fashioned. By accompanying your new releases with lots of marketing speak about weight and performance, you imply that the old is terrible and the new is great. This would have seen the 5-bolt MTB chainsets replaced by 4-bolt, because who wants old if you can have new?
Dura-Ace releases:

7400 - 1984 (7500/7600 are track versions)
7700 - 1996
7800 - 2003
7900 - 2008
9000 - 2012
R9100 - 2016

Shimano brought many technical improvements to chainrings in the 80s and 90s:

Uniglide
Superglide (later called 'SG-X



Specially matched chainrings, such that the big chainring 'helps' a smaller ring (1996, Dura Ace 7600)

By the time these features had reached all their groupsets, there was not much left to improve, except that more expensive groupsets would be better machined, lighter, etc.
So a (08/09 MY) Dura-Ace 7950 chainset looks like this:

and weighs 655g. At this point the chainrings were fairly lightweight being hollow ('hollowglide', introduced with 7800 &amp; also found on Ultegra) aluminium
The (12/13 MY) Dura-Ace 9000 chainset with 50/34 rings looks like this:

and weighs 610g, thanks to the use of carbon fibre composite. The use of four-arms achieves many goals:

it makes older chainsets look outdated

This then-current Sora chainset looks dated because of the chainrings:


it saves weight as 4-arms rather than 5

it creates incompatibility - no sales of third party chainrings because they won't fit, and the numerous versions mean that customers will often buy a new chainset instead of chainring.

it drives new sales with new buzzwords, new styling, and chainrings that won't work with your existing equipment. And there's a great justification - it is lighter.


With the release of Dura-Ace R9100, Shimano did not really have much to offer, but nonetheless they tweaked the chainrings a bit so they would not work with the old chainset (which weighs the same) https://handsonbike.blogspot.com/2018/06/shimano-dura-ace-9000-vs-r9100-crankset.html
Now the Claris (R2000) chainset resembles the Dura-Ace

In fact it has little in common apart from the overall shape, as it has solid arms and steel chainrings weighing in at 1.08kg. But it will help make older (in fact higher quality) equipment look outdated and drive sales of new product.
In particular, note that whatever technical advantages 4-bolt designs might have they are not really made available to most purchasers, because all except pricey chainsets will use relative heavy chainrings so any small weight savings from 4-arms are lost to the use of cheap heavy materials.