In my experience the gopher community is very split on this concept with many people doing just that, but many others (myself included) wishing that gopher/web proxies and cross posting did not exist at all.

Is there much (any) gopher community left?

There is! I read this on a gopher mirror of the Hacker News, so I thought I'd better come on over to the web version to respond...

In fact, several regular gopherites have commented on this thread.

Funny that this came up on the Hacker News on the weekend that the server is going down. Probably a good thing, since it only has 128MB of RAM.

There are some. It's had something of a resurgence in the last couple of years and a few new gopherholes have opened up.

You can peruse gopherspace via the overbite gateway, and the big gopher search engine, Veronica, is still up and running.

Take a look! :)

SDF[1] and many of the various tilde PUBNIX's both have gopher communities, and if you're on the fediverse (mastodon/plemora/etc) you'll find people listing gopherholes in the profile

[1] sdf.org