Nouveau is supported by Red Hat and even that's not a suitable replacement for proprietary NVidia drivers and that's only the GPU part. An entire computer platform is an even bigger task, so unless Apple starts releasing some source code under a usable license, the project will always play catchup.
Yes it will always play catchup. However a combined 8 years of targeted Apple Silicon development expertise has left the project in the past month. A big loss to the team is also all the organizational momentum from that as well. Hopefully another team picks up the project if this team cannot finish it.
I've contributed to quite a few opensource projects in the past. I know how to work around binary blobs and what troubleshooting, reverse engineering it takes.
It takes a special type of person to be a Foss developer. There isn't a lot of pay and unfortunately a lot of people seem to feel entitled to your work. It's a hard thing to manage. I know the head of the project left because of that feeling. Not sure what this new departure is about exactly. Though it could be related to him just as much as anything else.