I don't think this is intended as a one-person technological solution. It's a one-person research project, trying to see if there are any architectural changes

I don't think this is intended as a one-person technological solution. It's a one-person research project, trying to see if there are any architectural changes that can be applied to other distros that people actually use, such as Debian or Nix. It's true that the commons needs people willing to put in time and effort on boring things, but they have to be boring in the first place. If the author were to show up and say "Hey, Nix, if you rearchitect in this massive way it may or may not bring big improvements" and sent in a pull request, it would be rightly rejected. But it's still possible that a few days of rearchitecture can deliver the same results as a year of profiling and microoptimizations. The point of distri, as I understand it, is to have something to point to and say, this architectural change will actually work, and it's worth implementing in an actually-used distro.