It does seem like an argument for these aging archs moving to more specialized or smaller projects like NetBSD rather than trying to keep up with a huge, genera

It does seem like an argument for these aging archs moving to more specialized or smaller projects like NetBSD rather than trying to keep up with a huge, general-purpose one like Debian. The BSD monorepo approach also benefits from making any necessary changes in house rather than needing to maintain patches to disparate upstream packages.