Looks like I found a mild reason why UBPorts for pinephone hasn't seen much progress.

[kugiigi]

There are constant work for UT. In fact, OTA-14 has just been released and although this isn't for the pine devices, the changes and fixes in this OTA will or are already in the Pinephone. There are many pine-specific issues though and I guess those are the basis of why people think UT is slowly progressing. I think many of these issues are trivial so it could take time but I believe someone is already working on the kernel upgrade. Qt5.12 upgrade is also in-progress which will bring performance improvements and I believe the camera improvements shown before. By the way, there's a recent fix that is notable, music can now play even with locked screen. It's still not perfect but it worked when I tried.