This made me wonder if that work could actually help save the Aquaris M10 from being scrapped when 20.04 is up and running. You never know.
Is this useless or is this something to work on?

I followed you train of thought and put together a list of possible trees that might come handy for you to port to Halium image.

https://forums.ubports.com/topic/6790/device-tree-list

If I understood correctly:
cm/lineage 16.0 is Halium 9.0 (preferred?)
cm/lineage 14.1 is Halium 7.1 (good)
cm/lineage 12.1 is Halium 5.1 (current?)

I put there also vegetalte (Vegeta 5G) that someone started porting long time ago