On the one hand, he didn’t say they were never going to work on it. On the other hand, he also didn’t say they have plans to work on it.
My unsolicited two cents: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If you don’t have the resources for the revamp of your dreams, then do the bare minimum you think you can handle. Recode the notifications dropdown so that they stay unread unless clicked on individually. Or make notifcations exportable as a CSV so that the user can save/sort them as they like. Or redesign dashboard to be more compact of a list, with read/unread distinguished, like it is on the app. Or take different types of currently existing notications and put them on their own tabs–dashboard already has a tab for “your content” so just make a few more for “your mentions” etc.