The original author has a habit of abandoning software projects after a while. But I think they managed to get it into the pypa docs (python packaging 'authority'), and so I guess someone has brought it back.

I believe, after some conflict with the community, the original author divested himself of all his F/OSS projects. This resulted in pipenv being donated to the pypa GitHub org. Since then, the project appears to be seeing sporadic development through community contributions.

yeah, but also even before they were much more active in starting a project than interested in maintaining it.