I agree! Much of this work was done as part of the overarching TACO project (https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco), in an attempt to distribute sparse tensor computations (https://rohany.github.io/publications/sc2022-spdistal.pdf). MLIR recently (~mid 2022) began implementing the ideas from TACO into a "sparse tensor" dialect, so perhaps some of these ideas could make it into there. I'm working with MLIR these days, and if I could re-do the project now I would probably utilize and targetb the MLIR linalg infrastructure!