These are not dev choices these are PM / biz dude choices. Devs are code monkeys who do what they’re told.
This ofc doesn't tell me if they work on it anymore, as they stopped rather arbitrarily at some date and maybe they continued on another platform, maybe the project was acquired and an agreement was to leave what existed in place, etc.
It's the strange expectation that if you are clever enough to use the software, you understand what happened with it 10 years ago. Later on I found the community had migrated to a (copied) fork of the project, which was not traceable through github.
I do feel like it's a trend.
A few years later, folks on HN will be waxing nostalgic and wondering why we can't build things like that anymore.
We build 350 microservices, we used all types of databases that existed, we even had a team that decided to make their own object database because after an extensive research "all current ones aren't good enough".
Every sprint people would discuss architecture and we should improve it, because we had full freedom to eliminate our technical debt.
We researched and developed our own "patented" distributed RBAC subsystem.
Product is still in alpha and it seems to me its too slow to release on market.
It's for B2E sector and the backlog for any decent sale is still to big to have a meaningful usage.