It never went away. I've had my main blog there since 2002 and tech one since 2006. It works, it's free. I don't have a paid account and never have, and I do not see the problems people mention because I have a working ad-blocker.
Among other things, it used to be fairly widely employed by Russian-speaking users until the government crackdown and mass comment spam in the mid-2010s. Essentially, the older generation skipped Wordpress, Blogger, MySpace, Google+, and many others and went from LiveJournal straight to Facebook and later to Telegram (the younger generation went from VK to Telegram).
It never went away. I've had my main blog there since 2002 and tech one since 2006. It works, it's free. I don't have a paid account and never have, and I do not see the problems people mention because I have a working ad-blocker.
I am sorry for those who don't.