[dimitrios1]

There's also libraries that are simple enough that they just work fine without constant updates. I have numerous libraries that I use that haven't had commits pushed for 2+ years. This is the other aspect: burnout is so rampant because it feels like it never stops and you can come up for air.

[marlor]

Burnout is made worse when you take on too many complex interactions and dependencies.

OSS works best when it’s a small project that does a single thing and does it well, but doesn’t rely on too many upstream projects for its functionality.

As soon as the project tries to do too much, it virtually needs a committee to coordinate it all. If it relies on too many upstream dependencies, then the maintainer will be hammered with complaints that “this doesn’t work with version 1.45 of foolib… fix it!”.

But a project that just lives in its own little world, doing its own little job? It’s something you can just maintain and improve at your leisure.

[dimitrios1]

The irony is we demand constant updates, pushes, recent commits, and maintenance, yet we use OSes with libraries and tools that were written decades ago and see little to no updates at times. Some of us go happily along using a decade old version of zlibc, for example. But when it comes to that latest NPM dependency -- if it doesn't have a commit within the last six months, psh! must be abandonware.