" This is his way to bring gcc into the modern era" and "He's seriously invested in cleaning up gcc and making it a competitive compiler."

Optimization wise, GCC is still much more modern than LLVM, and in fact, more modern than a most commercial compilers.

Architecture wise, there are warts, but bringing GCC into the modern era architecturally was never a technical/engineering challenge.

To be honest, speaking as a guy who wrote plenty of GCC's current optimizations, he'd be a lot better off fixing LLVM's JIT issues than trying to rearchitect GCC.

At this point, it's hard to come up with good reasons to continue work on GCC past "fun".