Long time player here since 2016. And over 5k hours logged on codex too. Also played FFE back in the latter 90's. (just imagine that, a 15 year break of no new Elite since FFE, so if Braben is still around , can't count out the Elite franchise 'dead' over decades; so in my case for space genre games, it was a few of the "X" games by egosoft, and the original KOTOR in between , and a decade (periodically ongoing still) with FSX until the Elite revival with ED).
My take is that Frontier and FDev still have a bunch of work to do with the new engine 'upgrades' that came with Odyssey. And it's unfortunate further console dev is halted, but I still believe Braben's words in his message that the continuing long term vision continues with ED even on just pc for now. Maybe JWE and the F! franchises will take a bit more of the Frontier stage with the interest by some of the major shareholders, but I still believe the Elite franchise won't be going away as long as Braben is still involved with Frontier..
Odyssey has laid a lot of the groundwork and infrastructure for a lot more potential of this 'new era' of ED. It's rough yes, but so was FSX in its first years since it's release in the mid-latter 00's where it was taxing on most pc systems struggling to improve framerates. Back then FSX was a major unprecedented revamp and upgrade to the long running msfs franchise with the use of modernized 3d graphics, gpus, and effects then, so it stumbled for a few years, but then became a leader again of the flight sim genre in the 10's. And I do hope the same will happen with ED and Odyssey in the following years, as Odyssey was a major pioneering effort in an unprecedented achievement of combining on-foot with the already existence of multiple gameplay style modes as well as the still unprecedented stellar forge interstellar and galactic spacesim modeling set to realtime simulation, furthering it's highly ambitious overall spacesim realizations.