For me, if there hasn't been activity for several years and I can't find it being widely used then I assume it abandoned.

That's a fair assumption and accurate for a lot of the bindings. It is true that there are a lot of bindings for ZeroMQ and many were weekend projects for a single project. However it's normal and expected in a large community. To treat that as significant is like saying, "I find a lot of abandoned HTTP server projects, so this 'Web' thingy sure looks doubtful."

For me, if there hasn't been any activity for several years yet it's still commonly used, I assume it's stable.

i find that there are at least a couple dozen issues/defects that haven't been addressed, and it doesn't seem like they're going to be