Ts-rest – what happens when a 3.3k star OSS project goes dormant

Last June, I switched my company's API stack to ts-rest — the contract-driven type-safe REST library for TypeScript. Today I'm staring at a repo that hasn't shipped a release in 11 months and wondering when to pull the ejection handle.

The timeline:

- Mar 2025: v3.52.1 ships (latest stable)

- Jun 2025: 3.53.0-rc.1 ships — the Zod v4 compatibility release

- Jun 2025–Feb 2026: 0 commits, 0 releases, 0 maintainer responses

- Feb 2026: PR #863 "feat: v4" opened, maintainer calls it "stable maintenance phase" — still open, unmerged 3 months later

- Today: 137 open issues, 117 on "is this project maintained?", zero replies

The fatal bug: #852 — rc.1 doesn't compile with stable Zod 4. The RC's whole reason for existing is Zod v4 compat, and Zod 4 stable actually breaks it.

Our team currently has two options:

1. Fork the repository ourselves to fix the bugs related to Zod.

2. Switch to Hono RPC.

However, we are really hesitant to depend on yet another new framework. Rather than being tied to a specific framework, we would much prefer a framework-agnostic type library.