What if he's really busy with some other projects and needs to escape from the community. We all know how the community can be, repeating the same questions over and over and asking for updates. I'm surprised that he stayed active for so long. Whether ETH continues to be popular or not will depend on the market and the market depends on Bitcoin. If another rally starts all coins will go crazy high, even the less popular ones.
Considering that Buterin is known for its somewhat bombastic statements, maybe this is only one more in a row and nothing else. Unlike some others developers he like media attention, so we can very often see his interviews or tweets. Some month ago he comment Jeremy Rubin ( developer of Bitcoin Core ) who say that “The collapse of ETH is inevitable.”, and he agreed with him - but in context that Ethereum needs to change from PoW to PoS.
now that the development is almost non-existent , dgc is a huge pump and dump top 50 coin
Although Dogecoin is known as some joke crypto, it has a very strong community and great support. Recent price increase is not just classic pump&dump scheme, it is associated with Dogethereum-Bridge. This will enable Doge to use Ethereum network, and this is big news for this coin.