Happy to see this bubble up every once in a while. Just to add onto this, here is some related stuff that I worked on since originally opening this thread.
I wrote LASArrays package as athought experiment for a slightly different interface for loading .las files.
I added a added a bunch of recipes to Yggdrasil so some common libraries are available as JLL files
PDAL
PCL
Entwine
cilantro
maybe a few more I am forgetting?