There are roughly 400 projects on that page; about 90 are in the attic, meaning formally retired. Another 25 are incubating, and some of those look like they’re already dead; nobody has checked the pulse and filled out the paperwork yet.

A huge chunk of Apache is Java libraries.

Some projects are just academia doing academia things; they graduate, the original people move on, and the project dies. Others are corporate donations, including the occasional “we don’t want to play with this anymore; maybe Apache can keep it alive” project.

That being said, the incubator graduation rate is still roughly 75–80%.

How useful or alive those graduates are five or ten years later is a different question.

Saying Apache is where software go to die is just wrong.