I think saying it's far from being on life support is really pushing it...
Maya's USD support so far is effectively just Animal Logic's open source stuff bundled with Maya, Bifrost is indeed the one place they're actually still doing development (as they still have that R&D team), Parallel graph evaluation in 2019 and 2020 are really just riding the coattails of work they did a few years ago.
Improvements to rendering infrastructure (Arnold) are orthogonal as far as I'm concerned as it's done by the SolidAngle team they acquired a few year ago.
They're effective keeping it running (moving to newer Qt versions and the future Python 3 version for VFX platforms in line with other DCCs) as far as many people are concerned, which at a stretch could be construed as "on life support".
Maya's USD support so far is effectively just Animal Logic's open source stuff bundled with Maya, Bifrost is indeed the one place they're actually still doing development (as they still have that R&D team), Parallel graph evaluation in 2019 and 2020 are really just riding the coattails of work they did a few years ago. Improvements to rendering infrastructure (Arnold) are orthogonal as far as I'm concerned as it's done by the SolidAngle team they acquired a few year ago.
They're effective keeping it running (moving to newer Qt versions and the future Python 3 version for VFX platforms in line with other DCCs) as far as many people are concerned, which at a stretch could be construed as "on life support".