I use meteor.js for all my prototyping and I have it running https://www.spoiled.tv (in production; with a React front-end and SSR). I'm not sure why you think it's dead, 1.6.2 has 200 commits waiting to be merged[1] with lively discussion.
We're building VulcanJS (http://vulcanjs.org) on top of Meteor. I wouldn't say it's dead, just that it's evolving into more of an all-in-one development environment (think Next.js or create-react-app, but more powerful) as opposed to a full-fledged full-stack framework (say that 5 times really fast) like it was originally designed to be.