The article title is “Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future” but according to the article Debian will drop i386 support because it will be dropped from the kernel. Seems like bad news for permacomputing folks.
(EDIT) modified the title since it seems more accurate to say that 32-bit support is being dropped. (reference)
I don’t have a deep knowledge of the kernel to know if it’s as easy as simply adding in a separate module.