I know almost nothing about this area. Just how much effort do you think it would take to get these tools to "good enough but no more"/MVP? Days/Weeks/Months/Years/Decades etc.?
Maybe you could cut a year off of those and still have something that is good enough but not state of the art.
If you need a feature or bug fix from Cadence, Synopsys, or Mentor, I've usually had releases that fix the issue within a week or two.
The article seems to imply that EDA vendors contributing to a common open source project is where EDA ought to go moving forward. That's a step in the right direction because it'd fix this support issue I mention. But it probably won't fix the cost issue.