"my new goal is to live a better life. In the end open-source doesn’t pay the bills so it’s best to focus on other things if you can, or if you just enjoy the project then that’s cool."
IMO he's still a "rockstar". It's just the Node and JS community that hypes everything disproportionally (they used to at least). The fact that he single-handedly built Apex (https://github.com/apex/apex) show that he's still prolific, and a programmer of note.
There's a similar story for Sindre Sorhus, who moved on from the JS community to Swift.
They give their work away for free while complaining someone else is willing to work for even less.
And programmers are supposedly smart.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=holowaychuk&sort=byDate&prefix...
Seems to be working on a startup which might explain the lack of noise.
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-TJ-Holowaychuk-is-real-I-...
Life happens.
Difference between living to code and coding to live kids, take note.