I was reading about who supports i915 and it looks like it was started by a company Tungsten Graphics which got sold to VMWare in 2008. I'm curious if over time the people at VMWare working on it left or put less effort into the codebase (they did a big shakeup of the company in 2016).
If that's the case hopefully it gets more attention eventually. Often with OSS it's some random developer working at some big company supporting these various drivers, not just people in their spare time.
This will always be problem with all software that changes, especially ones supporting hardware that also constantly evolves.