Also jumping on, forgive me, but I find this possibility compelling honestly and I agree, the sense I got from the show is either:
Orpheus is dead-dead, super dead, not coming back.*
Orpheus is a severed head on Naxos and Dream knows that but Calliope doesn't.
Option 2 is pretty horrifying. Honestly, it's damn near irredeemable if Dream hid Orpheus's state from Calliope, Orpheus's own mother. And to a previous point, the Furies saying Orpheus is dead, that does lend to the argument that canonically, in the show, he is dead because they're pretty all-knowing.
I can think of a variety of reasons why Option 1, Orpheus is dead in the show might be true:
Quick Doylist reason: the CGI of a severed head might not only be a pain in the ass to pull off, it might just look stupid on television or even funny looking. There's plenty of stuff that works in the comics and doesn't work on screen. They might have just made the decision that the severed head couldn't be done without looking goofy or just being way too horrifying.
The ambiguity: Look, the comic is super ambiguous about whether Orpheus is actually dead in that state of being a severed head. On the page, they seem to imply that he "died long ago" but he takes a lot of actions and, quite frankly, is pretty obviously alive by some definition. When Dream says Orpheus, "Died long ago" it doesn't feel objective, it feels like his subjective opinion he uses to comfort himself and that he is lying to himself.
Ableism: Let me be clear, I think the myth Neil was hearkening back to with Orpheus being a talking an undead talking head is based on a story where Orpheus's head has oracular powers after he dies, it's kind of an obscure myth but it is there and I think he was aiming for a sort of mythologically informed horror story around that. A better depiction might have been Orpheus's skull can talk because it would more strongly indicate that he's like a ghost haunting his own severed head, NOT alive by any real definition, more like undead.
But quite frankly, if you say a man is dead just because he doesn't have use of his limbs, you're dancing pretty damn close in the real world to some pretty heinous ableism, saying for example that a paraplegic counts as dead. I've felt some discomfort around this ever since refreshing myself on the comics and I wouldn't blame the writers at all for deciding that a live action medium is not the right place to say "Oh no, it's not ableism, it's just an old Greek myth!" Like, nah. Might be better to just not raise the specter of ableism around whether or not Orpheus is defined as alive or dead just because he relies on others for mobility after losing access to his limbs.
And finally, just speaking from experience as a writer, I almost always say Orpheus is dead-dead in my fanfics because it fits the story we see on screen in Sandman better. It just feels right for what we see. This is entirely my gut feeling, so feel free to laugh at me if I'm wrong, but sometimes when you write half a million words of fanfic in a universe you get a bit of a gut feeling about what works and what doesn't in that story. Dream being a grief-stricken divorced dad to an adult son who died, a death that haunts Dream to this day, destroyed his marriage, and left him an emotionally broken and depressed shell of his former self is a story that works for the Dream we see on screen.
A Dream who allowed his son to suffer living death for 2,500 years is not only, quite frankly, monstrous but arguably irredeemable, especially if (as mentioned before) he didn't tell Calliope. It also means any grief Dream might feel is tainted by his ongoing crimes against his son. Any grief we might feel for Dream's suffering is tainted, again, by the fact he's actively allowing his son to suffer living death this whole time. Like that is just really hard to come back from, sympathetically speaking. And I'm not sure his emotional goodbye to his son in the comic is enough (see the aforementioned "the severed head might look too stupid or too gross for television") to redeem that, even if it's a beautiful moment.
Basically, I think there's a lot of reasons to believe Orpheus might indeed be fully dead in the show and I wouldn't blame them if he is.
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