You are arguing a red herring. I never posited that update frequency is the only useful metric, or that you shouldn't consider how well the library itself work

You are arguing a red herring. I never posited that update frequency is the only useful metric, or that you shouldn't consider how well the library itself works. You should consider all the aspects that are relevant to your use cases...and often this should include the community strength, along with the intrinsic library design, funding, documentation, etc. Certainly you shouldn't stop at the library design and code itself, that is just one of many considerations to weigh when adopting a dependency.