I have to admit the pushback on ET_STAT is not completely unexpected. I can see why the gABI thread would argue that it can be solved without a new e_type. It would be a major change that requires updating all toolchains, on the consumer and producer side. It would certainly take over a decade for the support to percolate everywhere, including some of the mobile and embedded toolchains where I've had these static linking & symbol visibility issues before.
The reason I still wouldn't mind ET_STAT is that I feel it does remove some complexity in the long run by not relying on things like ar archives, their hidden members with special meaning, and their different flavors. We will still be working with ELF many decades from now, so I still see some value in doing these slow migrations that simplify the final design. I would be happy if fifty or a hundred years from now ar archives becomes history, like ELF has done to the a.out format.
That aside, there are also some interesting alternative ideas in the gABI thread (STB_LIBLOCAL is intriguing), but it seems like the path forward is through the toolchain first.
I'd consider it a very nice result if third-party tools like armerge are deprecated by upstream support in the native toolchain (but I appreciate the mention in the article!)
And thank you for continuing to work on this, really appreciate the work you've been doing there.