The biggest "source" of vibes that CouchDB/PouchDB is "dead/maintenance mode" is the corporate ecosystem/contributors around it:
- Couchbase has been increasingly moving away from CouchDB compatibility
- Cloudant was one of the more active contributors until it got eaten by IBM and put into a maintenance spiral (what mother can love what IBM "Blue Mix" has done to Cloudant?)
- In general the still growing number of document DBs that are Mongo-compatible but not CouchDB-compatible (AWS and Azure document DB offerings, for instance)
In Open Source the winds of commercial favor aren't always reflective of Open Source contributor passion, but there too the pace of PouchDB seemed to greatly slow down a few years ago, and lost the interest of some major contributors. CouchDB itself seems to have gotten hugely stuck in a bunch of Apache committees over the design of the next semver major version, with a ton of huge breaking changes that don't really seem to be for solving problems but do some architecture battle under the hood, some political war between Erlang and other programming languages for superiority, and some political war between Apache trying to consolidate core functionality with some of the other database-like engines in their ~~graveyard~~ custodianship.
- Couchbase has been increasingly moving away from CouchDB compatibility
- Cloudant was one of the more active contributors until it got eaten by IBM and put into a maintenance spiral (what mother can love what IBM "Blue Mix" has done to Cloudant?)
- In general the still growing number of document DBs that are Mongo-compatible but not CouchDB-compatible (AWS and Azure document DB offerings, for instance)
In Open Source the winds of commercial favor aren't always reflective of Open Source contributor passion, but there too the pace of PouchDB seemed to greatly slow down a few years ago, and lost the interest of some major contributors. CouchDB itself seems to have gotten hugely stuck in a bunch of Apache committees over the design of the next semver major version, with a ton of huge breaking changes that don't really seem to be for solving problems but do some architecture battle under the hood, some political war between Erlang and other programming languages for superiority, and some political war between Apache trying to consolidate core functionality with some of the other database-like engines in their ~~graveyard~~ custodianship.