Cyclone did a similar thing too, iiuc
The first step is build as 32 bits as clean as possible then attempt to update to be able to also build for 64 bits.
Actually it's already working on Ubuntu 18.04 see the build here https://github.com/mingodad/cyclone/actions .
One of the main reasons to do it is to preserve for historical purposes .
There is also this other repositories that seems to try something similar:
https://github.com/moon-chilled/cyclonic https://github.com/catb0t/cyclone https://github.com/pippijn/cyclone https://github.com/iphydf/cyclone