From the outside the message I am receiving is "hurry up and wait for a new maintainer to emerge from closed-door discussions between Mike, CloudFlare, and unspecified other parties." However, this has been the situation for over a year now, and presumably there have already been fruitless discussions with all of the obvious candidates. (Reading between the lines I suspect that the job description was "Mike Pall 2.0" and the qualified candidates were simply too expensive, but that is speculation.)
So what next for LuaJIT users? Keep waiting? Create a fork? Whine on Hacker News?
Personally I don't think we need a "Mike Pall 2.0." What we need is mere-mortal active maintainers who can review, merge, and maintain extensions developed by the community. This work could conceivably be spread between many hands -- if some of those hands would have a commit bit. I think it unfortunate that excellent work like Thomas Fransham's intrinsics implementation are stuck in limbo because there is nobody available to review and commit them.
End rant. I say this as a lover of LuaJIT and somebody who is using it for the long haul and thus very interested in its ongoing development.
