What makes it "abandomware"? It has commits as of 19 days ago and a release three months ago. Pretty sure Otwell continues to update and is a stripped down version of a very active framework.

Abandonware? It's still actively supported/updated with each major Laravel release. We use it in our shop for some quick microservices.

Laravel Elixir is the abandonware. It was introduced in 5.0 then unceremoniously dropped in 5.4 being replaced by Laravel Mix.

Today it is essentially unmaintained: https://github.com/laravel/elixir