Fucking finally! Between this and deprecating Bash [1], I'm glad macOS is dropping all these obsolete packages it's been including (Emacs soon?). Their antiquity mean they're more of a hindrance to proper development than help.
Now, if they'd officially endorse one open-source packaging solution as an alternative, I'd be fully satisfied.
MacPorts has or had semi-official status. It was hosted by macOS Forge, which was an official Apple site that included other projects such as XQuartz. I'm unclear on the current status.
MacOS Forge has been deprecated for years (2016?), all its hosted projects have moved off. I don't think Apple has done anything for MacPorts since then, so I wouldn't consider it a current endorsement.
MacPorts was started by Apple engineers as part of OpenDarwin and then spun off into a community project like the rest of the projects on macOS Forge, and just like the other projects it is still worked on in part by Apple engineers.
It's not dead! [1] I use it daily, and it's working just fine. For example, check out the (centralized) list [2] of Ports files that define the packages. You can see it's pretty lively
But your perception that it's dead is certainly symptomatic of an issue for the project.
_Ruby_ devs are going to be attracted to Homebrew because it (and the "recipe" for building every Homebrew package) is written in Ruby. The test of MacPorts is how many non-Ruby devs use it.
Whether or not anyone uses it, it is still linked from https://developer.apple.com/opensource/ and was part of Apple's open source strategy several years ago. Regarding Ruby, Apple backed the MacRuby implementation for a while but that also petered out.
Now, if they'd officially endorse one open-source packaging solution as an alternative, I'd be fully satisfied.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20090193