Sure, just like university pages die out because students stop visiting them... Oh wait they don't. Despite most being terrible and badly indexed.

See, there are secondary deeper sources like word of mouth, aggregators like reddit etc. They do not direct a lot of traffic but they will make a good site (esp. specialist) resurface every now and again. There are also mailing lists and forums which are too diffuse to count in many cases.

This is opposed to relatively less worthy news sites or ones depending on ad income to run.

Or perhaps the page has very specific content, requiring specific search which means there is little competition except from junk like Quora...