MacPorts makes no effort to not look abandoned. It's very much 'the old way' of doing things from the look of the website to the terseness of the syntax. Before you take offense, I say this as a member of that generation.
These days if you have an ugly website, and opaque syntax, you're considered to be an abandoned project. Agree with it or not, your website sends a signal to the user and MacPort's signal says "it'll work till it doesn't and that's fine"
What are the odds that an Apple user finds that site attractive? I come from the linux world, so fine by me, but I'm no dummy, this site looks like it's going to tell me it runs better in a modern browser like IE6.
Completely agree, I'm a brew user myself but find the site of MacPorts rather clean and modern. It's responsive and doesn't feel abandoned at all (particularly https://ports.macports.org which support Dark mode). Plus, using brew, I never go to the website so I don't think this is really important.
These days if you have an ugly website, and opaque syntax, you're considered to be an abandoned project. Agree with it or not, your website sends a signal to the user and MacPort's signal says "it'll work till it doesn't and that's fine"