While I agree that library number is an okay barometer of community health. I'd also look at age of packages and latest commits to gauge a trajectory. Furthermore, if I found the packages I needed to accomplish most tasks (auth, task scheduling, message queuing, database, logging, serialization) and those packages were of good quality, does sheer number even matter at that point? I'd say when looking at Elixir's community health vs something like Nim or Crystal, it's in great shape. (and I'm not wiling to call either of those languages "defunct")