I sometimes find solutions to specific problems on GitHub which are stale. i.e. years since they had any work done on them.

If the underlying code looks solid and useful to me, then I might try to use it. But in most cases, I keep looking for something that is reasonably lively.

The key thing I keep in mind is that open source means that the developers primarily wrote the software to scratch their own itch. In time priorities change and it is unreasonable to expect them to support something they have lost interest in. In most cases, "better" solutions have emerged and thence their loss of interest.