The active user tracker is quite inaccurate as it’s not fully indexing all servers. Plus you never know if a decline is not merely a sign that the anti-spambot measures are taking hold.

New releases have always been slow since there are more fundamental changes being done for the time being. Once everything works well under the hood, I’m sure the releases will be pouring in faster when it’s only cosmetically things that are being addressed, where not much testing is needed.

As far as hating the community goes - please name one social media platform that’s universally loved.

Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it’s not as toxic and bot infected as reddit nowadays. There are 3 major toxic instances (lemmygrad.org, lemmy.ml, hexbear.net), blocking those will improve your experience on the platform massively. (Unfortunately .ml still has some of the large communities without decently sized alternatives elsewhere, so maybe you’re better off blocking individual communities rather than the whole instance).

As far as receiving comments and upvotes is concerned - are you sure it’s actual people and not bots?