Especially happy to see Tantacrul delving into the history and mission of the project. It's one aspect that many UI/UX designers miss which causes massive amounts of wasted effort.
In a former job capacity, I personally oversaw a group of >40,000 individuals all over the globe, who relied on Audacity to make a living. With Tantacrul on the UX side of things, my hope is that nothing too radical is done to negate the expectations of these users, as many of them are not tech-savvy and learning a new interface for them is basically the same as learning a new tool altogether.
Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface.
That is not to say that there are not many sensible changes that could be and maybe should be made to Audacity. I am just saying that stability is far more valuable for me. I rather wish for more stability in software than better UI.
And here is the beauty of non-web based software, you can guarantee that you always will! Same executable on your computer represents the same program launched, forever. Things don't change under the hood without you saying "yes", so if you want the UI to remain the same forever, you're welcome to. If you later want to upgrade, you can, but you'll never be forced to.
In practice, especially on Linux, binaries only work for specific distributions of specific major versions. It can be very difficult to get a binary to work a few years down the line.
Of course solutions like Appimage help quite a bit as software comes with most dependencies packaged inside but even then its not perfect. It will slow down the bit rot but not stop it.
On the other hand, lots of people encounter Audacity maybe for the first time and the UI might be unappealing or confusing.
I think there is space for both you who wants an "eternal" tool and the new user who might want something more apporachable.