Just some more insight onto this particular upgrade! The gov/groups module updates necessary to do this are roadmapped to be part of Cosmos SDK v0.46 in the v8-Rho upgrade, not v7-Theta (which is the one currently in voting period.
The idea is for governance to be able to control any kind of transaction if the proposal-maker structures it properly, in contrast to how we currently only have 4 specific proposal types (Signaling, Community Spend, Param Change, Software Upgrade). In the Fireside chat they theorize about having an account controlled by the governance module and the ability for a proposal to delegate ATOM from that account to a validator. These features are far enough in the future that it’s hard to say precisely what that would look like and how many steps it might take to get there.
With the groups module, you could also do something like sending ATOM from the Community Pool to a new DAO that is meant to delegate to up-and-coming validators.
All this to say that there are a variety of ways that the Hub could use Community Pool funds (which are already separate from the Interchain Foundation) to help out smaller validators but the timeline is a bit longer and it’s not an out-of-the-box solution - someone’s going to have to make some proposals to make it happen. Look out for the Rho upgrade! 