I'd argue that sister projects such as Wikidata, Wikiversity, etc, are greatly useful and that the solution to improving them is not to neglect them, but to provide more resources to them.
Wikidata was launched by the same people launching Wikifunctions, in service of the same broader goals around abstraction of facts and semantic usage. A lot of similar design decisions are being made there, and it's arguably why Google.org invested in the Wikifunctions project (more and better programmatic interfaces to Wikidata = more semantic context across more languages that Google gets for free).
Im not super active in the wiki community anymore but last time I heard it being discussed, wikiuniversity seemed like something that caused more issues than it solved for wiki admins. Is that not the case anymore? Did it get better?
That's a byproduct of a lack of volunteer contributors rather than the project design itself.
Maybe so, but Wikipedia itself is fraying at the seams these days. Less and less Administrators every year, less and less committed editors, and more and more tech rot. See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550441 for more context.