Yep, I'm familiar with UBPort's work (and even have used their QPA Mir plugin for reference for some of my work on Budgie Desktop). I probably missed the mark with communicating on the Ubuntu Touch part when I was focused on the fluidity of the intro itself, the emphasis was more on Canonical dropping out of the race, not the project wholesale being gone. This is similar to the original KaiOS fork of Firefox OS (I believe KaiOS has since moved to being Android-based?)
I agree that the work the UBPorts folks are doing is very valuable to the community!
Thank you for taking the time to comment here with the extra context and info for folks, it's really appreciated.