We virtue signal around project activity, especially on Github. We use activity as a proxy for whether we will be stuck with bugs without workarounds.

But a baked piece of software that doesn’t interact with fast changing parts of the ecosystem doesn’t need to change.

If I saw a dormant project in Rust or Node that handled asynchronous calls I would probably stay away. But a logging library, text processing tool, or unit testing framework might be pretty baked.

In that case the active projects are catching up, which means new bugs. Bugs that I might get stuck with anyway.