The latest release is dated 2 days ago https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum . Actively supporting is not the same as actively developing.

This should probably be taken as “I am tired of supporting everyone who did not RTFM, too bad if you can’t make it work” and is a totally reasonable thing to do, especially as the project gain more traction.

There is a pretty good community around reticulum that is usually supportive.

For those of you who are interested in this but don’t know where to start I think https://www.freedombox.org/ may be a good starting point. It’s been around for a long time, provides easy enough installation and a nice web interface for management. Its based on Debian and you can give it a try on their demo.

Also the vision for the project aligns pretty much with what op is saying https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Vision