Don’t sigh
A lot of software developed to prove a concept never reaches the status of being a supported product. There can be many reasons for this: Maybe the concept is flawed and there are insurmountable technical issues, maybe a better alternative is found, or maybe the hoped for value isn’t realized.
In the closed source world you rarely see the many projects that don’t make it to “product”, in the FOSS world you’ll see many that don’t get that far. That should be seen as an advantage of FOSS, not a disappointment.
If these projects work well enough for you, you can use them. If they don’t work well enough for you then you can benefit from them by fixing them yourself or motivating someone with the necessary skills to do it. If even that is impossible you may be inspired to do something better.
As for chromium-mir-kiosk: We know people are using it and, because of that, haven’t removed it from the store. But, as a result of our work on chromium-mir-kiosk, we identified a number of technical issues that we could not have predicted beforehand. Fortunately our work inspired something similar that has fewer problems: wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk.
I realise that it is unlikely for “a researcher in a completely different field”, but you want to approach Canonical on a commercial basis, they would likely be willing to revive the project. (To do a good job, that would require funding at least one developer.) Similarly, If you want to take over chromium-mir-kiosk yourself, that’s FOSS (but, in practice, I think you’ll reach the same conclusion we did).
Please see the good in having all these options!
As for testing on your desktop: