This is an incorrect interpretation of what happened in the decision to stop supporting zcashd.
The ECC engineering team is in full agreement that zcashd is legacy software that is far too expensive to maintain, and working in C++ results in a huge cost for safety analysis whenever we make code changes there. C++ is not a safe language, and zcashd is not well-written C++; while the bitcoind codebase has evolved and improved since 2016, ECC has not had the resources to backport many of those improvements (and such backports are colossal efforts because they must be reviewed for safety in the context of the changes made to support the shielded protocols.)
I personally advocated rather hard that the zcashd full node wallet be considered deprecated prior to the NU5 upgrade so that we could focus our resources on developing the Rust wallet stack, exactly because of the huge cost of updating zcashd to support Orchard. Updating the zcashd wallet to support Orchard was a significant cause of the delay in releasing NU5.
Essentially, zcashd is a dead albatross hung about Zcash’s neck, and the sooner it can be fully deprecated, the better it will be for the entire ecosystem.