I agree the Certbot team has not been forthcoming about their plans to address changes by Let's Encrypt. I doubt it is due to lack of comms as you surmise but one of priority at EFF. But I only guess as some rando 
The way forward for ACME Clients is to support ARI. It allows an ACME Server that support ARI (like Let's Encrypt) to inform the client when a cert should be renewed. This handles various cases: revoked certs, pending CA revocations, different cert lifetimes, and possibly other things like load leveling at the CA's servers.
I believe Certbot is planning on rolling out support for ARI this year. Other ACME Clients already include such support. To be clear, it is not necessary for ACME Clients to use CRL if they support ARI (which they should anyway).