Even now with Hector out of the picture, there’s still no suitable path forward for rust in Linux. No wonder why people are giving up (exactly what the blockers want).
The suitable path forward is to submit the patch series like normal to Linus, where it will be merged regardless of CH's NACK. CH isn't able to actually stop this process, he's just being a jerk.
However, I agree with you that it would have been nice to actually publicly clarify the situation rather than ignore it and deal with the whole thing behind closed doors. It shouldn't need to be explained that letting this sort of thing fester is a great way to kill motivation in a project and ensure it's less likely that new people will get involved.
I only see Danilo doing that in that thread. And admittedly Linus didn't respond (and Greg KH only minimally responded). But even CC probably means a lot of mail for top maintainers, and at that point I don't see anything that would've gotten in the way of "send a PR despite the Nacked-by", which has been done in the past.
Even if there was, I'm not sure I trust the word of such a drama-seeker directly, so it's reasonable to a evidence of on-mailing-list appeals adding CC (as Danilo did), and if that fails mention of contacting Linus off-list in that specific subthread.