It's not as much of a meme as fairly good heuristics. Most software has bugs, or depend on other pieces of software who have bugs. Most software can be improved or integrate with new technologies that weren't prevalent a few years ago. If software is good, it generally has a solid user base (relative to its target audience), and people will ask for tweaks and features--author can rightfully reject most of them, but it's a rare thing that absolutely none of them merits to be accepted.
So, when you discover a project that might be useful to you but you never heard of it and it's been inactive for years, I still believe it's quite a good rule of thumb to be leery before committing serious time and efforts to using it in anger. Which doesn't mean that counter-examples don't exist, naturally.