I suspect all many documented projects died because people couldn't figure out how to use them. By natural selection, anything that survived the good old days is either obvious or well documented. The C programming language, for example.
> By natural selection, anything that survived the good old days is either obvious or well documented
Or so much better than the competition that people use it in spite of poor documentation. Many things like that also grow a cottage industry of people making documentation and teaching (see React or Rails).
