Lots of "fatter" embedded systems run on FreeBSD due to the more favorable license situation. Not so much SOHO routers, but big industrial routers will use it. Juniper is a notable example. But also 1U firewalls, SANs, etc... are often FreeBSD based.
Well that's the tragedy of not contributing back upstream then.
If there were companies actively maintaining the 32 bit port, there would be no plans of dropping it.
32-bit x86 CPUs haven't been made in years, companies building products based on FreeBSD switched to 64-bit x86 or to other architectures long ago. It's not that work on i386 is being done but kept in private repos and not upstreamed -- work on i386 just isn't being done at all.
