Schabi here:
The team wants to start the rewrite in 2024 after 0.26.0 got released. The reson for the rewrite: Codebase got hard to maintin so we need to refactor. Also android changed the UI style and the UI frameworks a lot. We want to stay up to date with that.
Yes. Contributors are abaoloutly welcome, and Jetpack and Kotlin is exactly what we are looking for. However we need to prepare and sort out things before we can start. Stay put and follow our blog to find out when we begin: https://newpipe.net/blog