Yeah, when a project loses a clear message, it's more likely to die a slow death than anything else. However, they did point out why they made that change: even recent distros could actually run very decently on older hardware, which made them lose their former "edge" on that matter. Personally, I think LXDE/Lubuntu is obsolete. Xfce/Mate can be very good replacements with low footprint these days.

It should still run on old hardware, just not the most ancient tired iron.