> Xorg is is nearing the end of its life as an actively developed project.
There are people like Keith Packard who work on it exclusively. Xorg is open source, open source software - especially when it has actual users with technical knowledge - doesn't die because some company wishes so.
> You can see that the release cadence is much slower than it was a couple years ago, it’s gone from something like a six-month cadence to a two-year cadence.
Xorg isn't really a single thing as it was in the past but a collection of libraries - some of these libraries are at a very stable point where they do not need updates, others are shared by some Wayland projects so they should be up to date and others... if they need any update i'm sure someone will do it.
> The lion’s share of the development is sponsored by orgs like Red Had and they’ve publicly warned people that this may not continue into the future.
There is no "they", only Red Had wrote a blog post some time ago that they wont do much new development in Xorg but Red Had doesn't own Xorg nor they control its development.
> You simply can’t use X font rendering to achieve what is, in 2020, considered to be the bare minimum for text presentation.
The bare minimum for text presentation is to render text. You can do that perfectly fine with the core X font API - many people (including me) use xterm and similar minimal software just fine. What you cannot do is render antialiased font using that API (though IMO this is an oversight).
However you can use Xft to do that and as of a couple of months ago you can use it to render colored fonts like emoji, which basically covers most of font rendering use for 99% of applications out there (Xft doesn't handle complex text layout, which is where Pango enters the picture, but most GUI software doesn't use that anyway).
> Up until recently, this was papered over by libraries that could abstract over the differences between old-style X fonts and modern TTF fonts (TTF is almost as old as X!) For various reasons, the backwards compatibility was ditched a few months ago. The abstraction had just grown too unwieldy and had too many special cases.
Pango isn't the library for font rendering (even if it is popular) for X11, it is just one of several choices. Pango removing support for bitmap fonts is only a drawback for those who use the library but it doesn't affect anything else.