(Elastic) Implicit Skinning Feature

Whatever happened to implicit skinning or elastic implicit skinning? There was a lot of talk in 2013 about implicit skinning (Implicit Skinning: Real Time Skin Deformation with Contact Modeling). Then in 2017 Blender received funding from Google for the development of this feature. Then in a Feb. 2021 Animation and Rigging meeting, it was mentioned that " people dropped out." Not sure what that means. And what happened to the funding for the development? After that...everything went silent. I cannot find any more recent discussion. Can anyone provide some light on this?