Honestly, it kind of sucks that at this point you might as well call a project sunset if it has ASF stewardship, and that we seem to practically need the resources of a large company to keep an open source project "truly" afloat.
I vastly prefer the honesty in saying "sunset"; it helps bring more light to this situation, and will perhaps drive new approaches to funding foundations like the ASF.
Not everything in ASF is dead. OpenOffice probably is, but NetBeans is still being actively developed. Good thing, too, alongside IntelliJ it was probably the IDE most oriented toward getting people started writing Java code, rather than as a portal into the vast and confusing plugin ecosystem (looking at you, Eclipse).
I think this conflates several concerns which are unrelated. In particular, for a project to be under ASF stewardship does not mean it doesn't have large companies backing it. Look at projects like Kafka, Pulsar, Camel, Arrow, Spark, Flink, Pinot, Superset, Druid, etc. pp., they are all thriving and have strong funding.
Honestly, it kind of sucks that at this point you might as well call a project sunset if it has ASF stewardship, and that we seem to practically need the resources of a large company to keep an open source project "truly" afloat.
I vastly prefer the honesty in saying "sunset"; it helps bring more light to this situation, and will perhaps drive new approaches to funding foundations like the ASF.