It seems nobody but that gronkern guy was able to get his changes to run.
To be honest, this “give $component some love” was a design only series. I tried to sneak functional fixes into it 
In the telegram supergroup Florian mentioned that they might have someone to take over maintenance of the installer. I would contribute, but I find the code not-so-understandable.
I don’t think they are doing that with the installer. If you look at the last changes (Pull requests · ubports/ubports-installer · GitHub) most of them fixed some kind of errors in the installer or build setup or had functional enhancements like allowing to specify adb/fastboot when they are not in $PATH
Edit: the strange thing is, since 0.1.19 or so, the installer works for me most of the time. In contrast to other people’s experience I’m quite sure that 0.1.12 never worked for me (I always had to go back to 0.1.9).
Unfortunately there are subtle differences between linux distros. On opensuse the AppImage and deb versions for example can only work when adb/fastboot are in /usr/bin, having them in /usr/local/bin doesn’t work (that’s in $PATH for regular users but not for sudo; and it doesn’t help to run as root as the installer would still use sudo).