I’ve been lurking on this topic since the beginning and I can tell this whole discussion somehow represents the state of Meteor.
On one hand, we have this community. Not only this forum but also GitHub. We even had a conference last year! And I really do mean we here. I’ve learned about Meteor on my first days at @vazco, back in mid-2015. It was great - real-time data working out of the box, shared client/server code, a ton of Atmosphere packages, and Discover Meteor for an introduction. And since then, I’m working with Meteor projects in production on a daily basis. Time has passed, new solutions emerged (and some of them failed), but up to this day, over 5 and a half years later, I’m still happily using Meteor. We even have projects started back then, being rewritten view by view from Blaze to React (and then to React again as we started too early, in late 0.13), adding a REST API, then GraphQL API… All of that without stopping the world, having multiple deploys a week. We are happy with Meteor.
On the other hand, there are people who had used Meteor unsuccessfully, moved to other technology for other reasons, or simply never tried Meteor at all. All of them have their right to do so. I recommended other stacks many times as well, when other technology suited the project requirements better. Having said that, we’ve never migrated a project off Meteor. Optimizations, splitting monoliths, adding other technologies, and using them together - that’s our way of dealing with the problem.
But that’s all from my personal, developer’s perspective. And then the client asks us about the technology we plan to use for this new project. And it happened a few times, that the word “Meteor” caused a long discussion and required a lot of assuring the client that Meteor is fine. Having a portfolio helps here a lot. But for some of them, who don’t care about developer experience or hype, acquisition by Tiny helped even more. And I am thankful for that because the lack of “official support” is sometimes more problematic than the lack of actual support itself.
To sum up - I’m not surprised by this survey result, not at all. I don’t think that Meteor needs a rebranding either - it could only cause harm. I really believe, that the only thing that could definitely help (I’m not sure about others), is a constant improvement and a vivid community. And we have both. There are better and worse days months times, but we are doing it. We are doing it.