As someone who liked Gulp (SOOO much more than Grunt/Browserify) the transition from v3 to v4 felt really, really bad. Lots of unknowns around release timing, poor community support for the new version, "beta" tags sticking around forever long after it should have been released, maintainer turnover, etc...
It was enough at the time to get me to jump to Webpack, since it seemed like gulp was dying, and if I had to pick a configuration based tool it wasn't going to be Grunt.
Now I'm actually swinging back towards a combination of Gulp and ESBuild on my personal projects. I honestly debated trying a mix of Make and ESBuild (Since Gulp still feels pretty dead, and hasn't had a real release in 2+ years), but Make has enough subtle gotchas that I stuck with something familiar.
You're right about the community being mostly dead.
There are a lot of bugs and performance issues in the underlying libraries, and Gulp's developers have not been able to get the upstream updates integrated.
I just redid our Grunt stuff in Gulp. It was painful - difficult to find up-to-date information, and the result was not that great. I expected a much greater SCSS compilation performance increase compared to FS-based tooling. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
I'd switch to something like ESBuild and leave SCSS for dead, but it's not an option for me yet :(
