They dropped it during or right after (can't remember for sure) their massive layoffs where they fired like half of their best employees for no reason, that's also when Servo died! :(
What really amazes me as a european is that while I still think we have to work too much for our modern times we only do a fraction of your average work hours and that cases no issues whatsoever.
There is huge progress on the Mobile Linux front and Ubuntu Touch is still very much a thing but all of it is far from ready. The majore issue with phones is their closed source drivers and hellscape of vendor specific kernels tho, if they had mainline Linux kernels vendors could update them forever with relatively little effort, custom ROMs wouldn't need devixe specific ports and we could use much of the current mobile Linux progress accross a wide range of devices!
I never had a fast NVME SSD so my devices boot significantly slower than yours but unless you are actually at the point of instant booting it's about half the boot time for me. I only use OpenRC on my Pinephone because it's the default for PostmarketOS (a Alpine based OS for mobile phones) and never found a good enough reason to use it on my actual computer but it's quite a bit faster and also quite a bit less convinient so all in all probably not worth it but still impressive to watch!
That take isn't just ban it's plain disgusting, please inform yourself before you spread shit like that!!!!