Is there anyone from the Russian Wikipedia community intending to take this on? Do they need any support/advice/assistance?

I can only speak for myself in this, but unless the 2017WTE will be as fast as the current editor from the get-go, I see no local developers taking interest in supporting this project in its current state. It should be quite easy to implement this support, at least seeing the similar work (with different premise) from German user Schnark [1], but until there is an ability for developers to use 2017WTE comfortably, I don’t see any support coming out of this. For anyone that is interested in doing this, however, veAutocorrect is pretty similar in its function and structure to wikificator (or wikifier); the only difference is that wikificator is supposed to be activated by user instead of doing everything in sync.

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Schnark/js/veAutocorrect

(Stjn, you'll be glad to learn performance is exactly what the Editing team plans to spend this entire quarter on: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Audiences/2017-18_Q2_Goals#Contributors .)