Escape velocity and the Galnet News Digest is probably as close to getting galnet back as we are going to get.
It is less than ideal that the galaxy has gone silent, and morphed into a entirely static 'world' where the federation, alliance, and empire might as well be named faction 1,2, and 3 respectively and thargoids might as well be the aliens from x-com.
Galnet is just another abandoned feature/aspect of elite. No amount of arx/cosmetics will ever get it back. If a feature does not get enough traction or does not have a good enough immediate cost/benefit for Fdev it gets tossed in the bin or abandoned. Multi-crew, surface landings (mechanics wise), cqc, galnet, powerplay, codex, thargoids etc are all examples of feature built to check a box with possibly little plan of what to do with the feature, and then left to all but rot (with the exception of a few minor fixes/tweaks here and there) from there on out.
In the short term it is probably great for fdevs bottom line. Long term it erodes faith in the developer and the overall direction of the game. (Fdev seem to be target more casual gamers that will buy a ton of arx, and stop playing in a week, and so the amount of degradation to the game they are willing to tolerate is somewhat higher than it had been previously. It seems unlikely this maintenance threshold will ever go back to where it once was)