[vntok]

Have a look at the contributors graph, it's pretty self-explanatory: https://github.com/docker/compose/graphs/contributors

Out of the 100 people listed, I counted maybe 8 tops who committed at least a few times in 2022?

[theteapot]

That seems pretty normal for a not-dead project. And anyway lack of commits is more a proxy for stable as opposed to not actively used by a wide audience of software developers.

When the repo is archived, maybe that would serve as a basis for a "dead project" argument.