It matters even with recent cutoffs, these models have no idea when to use a package or not (if it's no longer maintained, etc)

You can fix this by first figuring out what packages to use or providing your package list, tho.

> these models have no idea when to use a package or not (if it's no longer maintained, etc)

They have ideas about what you tell them to have ideas about. In this case, when to use a package or not, differs a lot by person, organization or even project, so makes sense they wouldn't be heavily biased one way or another.

Personally I'd look at architecture of the package code before I'd look at when the last change was/how often it was updated, and if it was years since last change or yesterday have little bearing (usually) when deciding to use it, so I wouldn't want my LLM assistant to value it differently.