The most important thing I wanted to communicate was that active contributors are very important for a healthy project. And that if you add people to a project,

The most important thing I wanted to communicate was that active contributors are very important for a healthy project. And that if you add people to a project, the project stands a chance of outliving your individual contributions to it. If a project required constant fixing because, say, the code was very bad, then yes, I agree that would be a bad sign. But I was primarily thinking of dependency maintenance. I took a look at ncurses to see if I could learn anything about their success. I count 18 contributors in the README file, which is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about really. Seems like the package has been passed from one maintainer to the next as people's situation changes. This sort of thing is important! If ncurses had met with the same fate as most GitHub repositories, nobody would use it any more. It would be forgotten about. I took a look through the configure.in file too, and it looks like ncurses has very few dependencies beyond requiring a sane build environment. And I see that ncurses releases once every few years, and has been doing since the 90s. Oh, and the mailing list seems alive and well. All in all, ncurses seems to be exactly the sort of healthy project I was thinking of. Regular contributions, shared maintenance, very few dependencies, and a predictable release cadence.