A great example, in that there are six year old (important looking!) PRs sitting there without any feedback or action.

Ongoing maintenance of this nature is something often ignored by the "I could rewrite that, easy" folks.

It's a joke / PoC project. Nobody should expect it to be maintained in any way. None of those PRs are important in that way.

> Nobody should expect it to be maintained in any way.

Which is the exact problem of "I could rewrite this in a weekend!" scenario with curl, right?

It depends if the rewrite is meant as a joke or a serious minimal implementation.

I don't think it does. curl has been maintained for nearly 25 years now; there's a benefit to that, and I'd need someone to come up with very compelling reasons to write a new implementation before abandoning it beyond "my code is shorter".