It would be hard fork vs a soft fork. A lot more work. But in principle a project that doesn’t need features but stability is viable. See *BSD.

We’ll see what Motorola will cook up. Of course GOS team can’t maintain an Android fork on their own. It doesn’t need new features, just stability and security on the right hardware platform. And it’s too bad Google killed the Pixel tablets. There isn’t anything new supported on LineageOS either. Seems I have to bite the bullet, and look at Linux tablets.