I got the impression that the PolyMC situation was quite different, with that developer masking it and doing a minority of the work, but after one change made by the rest of the developers they snapped, used their control over the repository to remove the rest of the maintainers and take sole control over the repository.
I was aware of some shenanigans and hostility from PolyMC and never used it, but I got the impression there were no major outward signs before that happened?
I think the trick might be that nothing is stopping you from using more than one 32-bit integer to represent addresses and the kernel maps memory for processes in the first place, so as long as each process individually can work within the 32-bit address space, it’s possible for the kernel to allocate that extra memory to processes.
I do suppose on some level the architecture, as in the CPU and/or motherboard need to support retrieving memory using more than 32 bits of address space, which would also be what somebody else replied, and seems to be available since 1999 on both AMD and Intel.