One can only hope. I think it is better if the developers that care about clean UI and workflows were to focus on Ubuntu Budgie or maybe even Budgie 11 or entirely new DE altogether. But as far as modern feeling and clean UI design I really do think Budgie 10.5.x is an overlooked gem of a DE.
It is fine to be opinionated, but I always found the… opinions I guess by the people over at elementary to be rude, condescending and not really in the interest of its actual users. I think if that weren’t the case though there’d be tons more people volunteering to make it one of the most popular and best distros around.
Sorry but Fritos of software is dumb & in no way representative of bringing old chromebooks back to life beyond their support date.
Schools often buy the bottom baseline of everything & in now way was a 4gb of ram a good, decent or proper experience to begin w/ & their replacements probably also had 4gb of ram - just a faster cpu, gpu & ram to hide that it’s lacking ram still.
I think schools could easily band together & make their own education focused Linux distro & then just focus on hardware that’s compatible w/ that’s Chromebooks or Windows laptops. Hard part would be building out an on par MDM &/or ldap server if not using a Windows server.
All Chromebook are is a browser basically. It already is the bag of Fritos imho. I think the hard part though would be to hire an IT guy that knows Linux better than the students tbh. Schools already under pay teachers in the US & that goes 2-3x for IT staff.