Huh? Based on what? The packages I use keep getting updated, so clearly nixpkgs is alive. The OS I use keep getting updated, so clearly NixOS is alive to. Who exactly is dying, and what makes you believe that?
Isn't nixpkgs still a pretty bad state? I know there used to be a lot of "abandoned" packages that went years without updating to the new versions provided by upstream, that a lot of packages were copying binaries around instead of building open source software from the source, etc.
Nixpkgs is one of, if not the largest, package managers by # of packages. I think naturally that will result in more abandoned packages than others. What is the % of abandoned packages relative to total I can't say.
Nix tends to have updates almost as quickly as Arch does, I run a lot of bleeding edge software and have no issues, and the breadth of packages is immense. Nix just has a different style. With the AUR, you can adopt an abandoned package more easily. That has pros and cons (the AUR has recently suffered multiple supply-chain attacks due to packages being adopted and infected).
> Nixpkgs is one of, if not the largest, package managers by # of packages.
I'm fairly certain that the graph you're thinking of is complete bullshit. It only had approximately a third of the package count listed for a particular Ubuntu version than said version had in actuality.
Huh? Based on what? The packages I use keep getting updated, so clearly nixpkgs is alive. The OS I use keep getting updated, so clearly NixOS is alive to. Who exactly is dying, and what makes you believe that?