I feel this slow review process and lack of manpower, plus absent package maintainers, is a good subject for a separate topic. There are useful issues/PRs going back years, that were abandoned for similar reasons. There were minor discussions in the past (for example), but I couldn't find anything that came out of them. I think the time is ripe to discuss and address that. I'd volunteer to go through some package issues/PRs to at least tag them correctly, and potentially close irrelevant/addressed ones, but I don't have any permissions on GitHub.
Edit: started a new topic: