It is, but they are talking about the hardware in these last release notes, about a chip that will get replaced in the actual hardware, therefor i don't think they are completely dead!
Long lice Pine64
It is the same/similar problem that Nokia/Maemo and Sailfish/merOS have all had.
Some things are binary-blobs + NDAs and many things are still locked, the OSS community can only do so much before they hit the commercial roadblocks.
We need a complete CoreBoot + OSS silicon-chips + OSS firmware + all-community / all-commercial dual production lines.
The open-source-based company should be able to sell both the commercial locked-version and the oss-all-unlocked-version with the ability to switch infinitely between the two models.
But the world of electronics rarely will ever work or reach that level of interoperability , repairability or recycling this way. Not for a long time maybe in some distant future.