I think most of these solutions including OpenShift Virtualization, Hyper-V, Proxmox, etc. do live migration. What the previous post is talking about is some of the more advanced VMware live migration features like storage live migration and cross-cluster live migration and some of the automations layered over the top of them.
To my knowledge the CNCF has archived projects [1] before for one reason or another (most commonly inactivity), but I'm not aware of a case where they have actively kicked a project out.
It's also interesting to think about what that would even look like since part of the project being added to CNCF in the first place were the trademarks etc. got handed over too [2] - not just the code.
All the maintainers for linkerd are employed by Buoyant, which means under current graduation criteria it wouldn't have been graduated in the first place. Will be interesting to see if the CNCF TOC does anything about it though.
Well, that and there appears to at least be a commercial market for an LTS based on announcements from Red Hat, Azure, and now Amazon.
Azure are the ones who effectively posed the question in the community of hey, since we all appear to be doing this is there any value in collaborating on it in the open by rebooting the LTS working group.
Now that said, while you are absolutely right that third party solutions are the biggest boat anchor to users upgrading whether commercial or open source, they are also the reason an LTS doesn't necessarily fix much because then those things need an LTS too and/or they decide hey this is great we will fix on this one and it becomes an even bigger lift when the ISV does need to bring their stuff up to latest.