Drupal is a fairly popular CMS. As for what this means for the project, nothing good, but probably nothing serious either. They've lost of of their major contributors, and they've gained a lot of bad press, but it's still a huge project with a major corporate backer. The long run trajectory probably hasn't changed too much.
(Note: Drupal is essentially controlled by Acquia, and it was Acquia's CTO who decided to purge Garfield.)
It means the steady downward trend it's been on for the last 7-8 years is about to accelerate. PHP CMSes fill a niche of bespoke software deployments made irrelevant by more standardized collaboration and publishing tools with better usability.
>It means the steady downward trend it's been on for the last 7-8 years is about to accelerate.
I don't see this downward spiral trend you're talking about. Drupal 8 is one of the most dynamic and thought out CMS's available. Your statement would fit Wordpress better, and even that would still be wrong because its so widely used.
The common refrain in recent years has been that Drupal has been going for the enterprise instead of every single blogger like it used to. That could decrease search volume while still even growing in that segment.
Still, having both would obviously be better if somewhat difficult. Drupal hasn't completely given up on that idea but the trend has definitely been towards more about serving developers than a layperson who wants to set up a small website.
That's not to say everything necessarily is fine since Drupal 8's adoption has been slower than for previous versions but it looks like it may be finally picking up. The recent announcement that major Drupal versions will no longer be big backwards-compatibility breaks like they've been up until this point is something that could really help it too.
I believe Drupal seems to be the official of CMS of Stanford.edu and many of its departments' sites [0]. And back in the day, Drupal's adoption by President Obama's first CTO was noteworthy [1]. I don't think Drupal made huge inroads in the rest of the federal government, but the White House Github page shows that they still use and maintain Drupal module and theme code: https://github.com/whitehouse
(Note: Drupal is essentially controlled by Acquia, and it was Acquia's CTO who decided to purge Garfield.)