>I'm quite guilty here; I've realized that I always check the date of the last commit on Github before testing a project. I feel like I do this more for small projects where documentation and use cases might be missing, and for which I'm expecting help from the community.

I do it because of code rot. The environment you will surround the project with (runtimes, libraries, frameworks) has often changed enough in 2-4 years to render it unusuable.

Additionally a recent commit implies regular maintenance which implies that if you report it will get fixed.

Also, projects are often abandoned because there is a clearly better version out there.