I’m a huge fan of Jekyll—have been for 3+ years—and also a Rubyist. I plan on migrating my personal site from Jekyll to Bridgetown because Ruby’s my jam and I want to try something different, but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on Jekyll.
I like to refer to Jekyll as “the granddaddy of static site generators.” I encourage new developers to use Jekyll and GitHub Pages to create their portfolio websites because it’s such a great pairing for anyone at the introductory level—or any level for that matter!
As for Jekyll being considered dead, we have an entire community here on Jekyll Talk. If people are truly bothered by the prospect of this SSG becoming stagnant, they should start picking up issues and becoming regular contributors. Contact Ashwin Maroli and tell them you want to become a maintainer. It’s not easy keeping up with an open-source project and a codebase a large a Jekyll has got to be crazy! That’s definitely not a one-person job.
Open source is awesome and can lead to some great opportunities so if you’re thinking about it, just go for it! Reach out if you have questions about being a project maintainer (I’m on the Ruby for Good core team and our site is a Jekyll site) or open source in general and I’d be glad to chat about it.