My college roommate worked on that over the summer, the first version! Design rule checking, some layout tools, not a lot at first. He was very proud.

I tried to use it 10 years ago, before AutoCAD bought it. I wasn't very successful, although admittedly I didn't know what I was doing. Today, KiCad is more than capable for anything a hobbyist would work on. Eagle is just an interesting footnote.

Eagle was dead the moment that Autodesk bought it and turned it into subscription software. Subscription software is just too risky to depend on for anything important.

Autodesk are sunsetting it in favour of their subscription, cloud-based, always-online Fusion 360. Most Altium users are probably on a subscription too for that matter.

They had already made it subscription-only shortly after they bought it. That's when people generally stopped using it.

They're sunsetting it now as a result of that loss of users (imo).

It's also toxic on the low end.

As a hobbyist, I might want to spend a few weeks on designing PCBs, and then not again for months. I'll either have to over-buy an expensive annual contract or futz with activating and deactivating short-term subscriptions. Or use KiCAD or EasyEDA.