[tracker1]

Definitely seen this a lot in the JS/NPM ecosystem... You go searching for a module that does $thing... you find about 10, you sort and look at say the 3 most recently published an the 3-5 most downloaded/popular... is the repo open (github, usually), are there a lot of old issues left lingering with an old last publish date? Might take a passive look at the codebase to see if I can grok it and fix any issues I find if needed.

Choose what I feel is the best option. Trying to avoid dead packages, but not afraid to deal with older packages if they aren't just stale, but functionally complete. The shift towards ES import statements and TypeScript defs has also influenced my selection process.

I've seen plenty of cases where either a fork or new option effectively takes over. A lot of people are leaning towards Zod over Yue or Hono over Express. There's instances where the dev goes off the rails like with Faker and the community comes together to fork a solution.

All of the above examples definitely happen in practice. I'm guessing many packages all over the place have replaced various dependencies over the years.