Actually Amarok did see a revival in the past year or so! https://blogs.kde.org/2024/04/29/amarok-3.0-castaway-release...

They've recently pushed out a new release with the code base ported to Qt/Plasma 5 and are now going for Qt/Plasma 6.

Just because I looked that up recently, there are at least three forks based on amarok 1: Exaile (a GTK port), Clementine (a fork towards Qt4) and Strawberry (a fork of Clementine, I don't know the background).

Isn't Strawberry [1] a quite acceptable continuation?

[1]: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

They do have a somewhat maintained fork of the amarok 1.4 line that more or less works the way I liked: I've been using when I want to listen to music on my linux desktop. I think it's forked from a bit before the late amarok 1.4 releases.

EDIT: here's the latest changelog: https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Changelog_For_R14.1.3#amarok