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It's pretty easy right now to just change the header of the README, and/or the project description to indicate deprecation. What added benefit would making it a feature provide?

It requires the maintainer to do this. Often if the maintainer isn't maintaining the codebase then they won't be updating the readme either.

Wouldn't it be up to the maintainer to toggle the "no longer maintained" flag?

Sometimes a project that hasn't seen commits in a long time isn't orphaned, but just doesn't need changes...

I usually look at the "Pulse" part of the repo page. That tells me how often it has activity and if it is an active repo.

That is a really bad way to solve the issue, since smaller pieces of software may not need further development.

What's wrong with putting that in the project description ,or prepending it with a "DEPRECATED"? I mean the easily editable field in the header of every repository.