> frantic questions to the new language's communities about how this popular library hasn't had a commit in six weeks

Lol, my perspective is almost the opposite. If it's got a lot of commits in the last six weeks, I need to look for something that's stable. Unless there's a good reason for so many commits; I feel like that many commits means it's in active development, which implies the requirements and interfaces aren't yet determined and who wants to rely on that?