We intend to continue with CommonIO for all the reasons that you mention above. It was necessary to move it to a new home when the containing repository was deprecated.
The new location is here
That said, we would love to hear a lot of feedback on the direction with hardware abstraction in general. We have found that many Silicon vendors provide such abstractions already and we are trying to understand what would be the best way to provide FreeRTOS users with a consistent and familiar way of communicating with hardware without turning the code into Lasagna with multiple HAL layers on top of each other.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your specific use case? That would go a long way towards understanding the problems users actually need solved.