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I think you overestimate Canonical's size.

What is happening though is really long support for older releases being provided by Canonical so you will be able to use older Qt 5 based apps on Ubuntu, security supported, until 2034, on Canonical's dime. With container technology (something that Canonical significantly funded, with Docker originally being based on Canonical-funded LXC) you'll be able to run those older apps on a newer base OS including future ones, too.

Those are huge contributions to the user community you seem to be discounting.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical. I don't speak for Canonical. But what I say above are simple verifiable and falsifiable facts and not really a matter of opinion.

Seems like the root misstep is when extending server support to 10 years they extended GUI app support as well. The two probably shouldn't be linked and GUI support should end with the desktop edition at five years.

What about the other distros? Are they waiting on the community to do it for them?

I suspect that means waiting for Debian to do it.

Porting them out of tree would be worse than doing nothing.