I've seen some of the GitHub issues that Rich is referring to in those tweets. They're almost always cases where someone is asking for some feature or change in Svelte and the core contributors disagree that it fits with the design and vision of the project.

Then the OP tags Rich in the hopes that he will swoop in and and override the decision. It's almost always more of a tantrum than a real request for help.

As far as project progress, most of the recent work has been on SvelteKit, but I've been using Svelte for about a year now and it has steadily gained features during that time. It's definitely not in bugfix-only mode.