That's unfortunate. I appreciate the efforts you have spent on it. I hope someone with Debian experience can pick it up. My other projects besides PDAL include liblas, libspatialindex, and python-rtree.
I'm going to remove PDAL support from GRASS and remove PDAL from Debian. If you don't want this to happen, take over pdal maintenance now.
As for the lazperf issue, we have resolved this by vendoring lazperf in PDAL going forward. This was achieved by working with Rapidlasso to relicense both LASzip and lazperf as Apache Public License 2.0. PDAL 2.4, which is to be released in the next month or so, will have this in place. There will no longer be a need for PDAL to link to LASzip or lazperf going forward from 2.4
Howard