Kirkstone branches?

I had been using the TheYoctoJester/master-next branch to build for kirkstone, but that now fails due to the kirkstone branch being removed from the kacf/mender repository. Meanwhile, the official Mender layer repository still fails to build on the master-next branch, due to the OpenSSL 3.0 compatibility issue that I reported here. Is there a working branch that can be used for ongoing testing? Any further update on the timeline for a kirkstone release?