It’s a funny one because it’s not like it ever really took off. Architectures like m68k are also probably pretty dead, but there’s a ton of these chips out there in embedded or retro kit and you can probably find one to test on if you need it.

The Amiga crowd is probably the main reason m68k is still supported at all. It's a neat architecture but basically all of the hardware is out of production and has specifications which are untenable for a modern Linux system (<50 MHz, <256 MB RAM).

There are also newer M68K cores designed by retro-enthusiasts to run in FPGA, either as emulator or as CPU accelerator in vintage computers. An example, the Apollo 68080: http://apollo-computer.com/apollo68080.php

It was never a big lineup as well. For any generation there were only a few models.

Of course someone made an emulator! For example: https://github.com/itanium64/Rosalia64

(I don't know what pleasure someone can get out of declaring something "dead", but it's clearly a popular hobby.)

I was referring to a system emulator like qemu... that repo seems to only run windows exe files?