That is, this is likely easily solvable, but it is most easily solvable at the beginning of a project by choice of base libraries. I can understand not wanting to change things after the fact for a presumably small user base.
They claimed that they'd need a different implementation per distribution. Which makes no sense. It's just open()/ioctl_tty()/read()/write(), all of which are in the libc of every distribution that has ever existed since the 90s.