[mst]

The LTS kernel change appears to be lack of senior maintainer bandwidth.

This is not, in my experience, the sort of problem that could be solved by throwing money at it.

(and by "in my experience" I mean situations where I was involved with that shape of problem, and could have arranged to have money thrown at it, and the eventual decision was that that wasn't the limiting factor)

Note that this is entirely separate to the question of whether what TLF is doing with its money is suboptimal - it probably is - but I don't believe from what I've seen that the LTS kernel situation is downstream of funding decisions.