Hopefully the ecosystem as improved since then, but it was nearly impossible to get going.
Some packages had been changed and the version number overwritten with incompatible packages, and the conflicts were plenty.
It's OK. Not every language ecosystem is so busted that you can reliably expect a project not to work if someone isn't staring at it weekly and building it over and over again just in case. Now, it's always a risk, sure, no language anywhere is immune to the issue [1], but there's plenty of languages where you can encounter things from 5 years ago and your default presumption is that it's probably still working as well now as it did then. It may be wrong, but it's an OK default presumption.
[1]: Well... no language in common use anyhow. There's some really fringe stuff that uses what is basically content-based references for code dependencies, but I'm not aware of anything that I'd call "production quality" that even remotely looks like that, and is immune to someone just plain making an error with the semantic versioning or whatever.
Lol, my perspective is almost the opposite. If it's got a lot of commits in the last six weeks, I need to look for something that's stable. Unless there's a good reason for so many commits; I feel like that many commits means it's in active development, which implies the requirements and interfaces aren't yet determined and who wants to rely on that?