The problem is that people didn't choose Actix only for performance. I personally haven't used Actix, but it seems that all other contenders were lacking in some way, not only performance but also feature sets and flexibility and easiness. And thus we are now left with a horde of safe but otherwise lacking libraries instead of what could possibly be the best of breeds.
That's entirely fair - and I wasn't saying that choosing actix was a bad choice at the time for the users - but I also think that the people who were willing to contribute to Actix to make it safer are probably also the type of people who are willing to contribute to those other libraries to make them more useful.
If there is one trend that has been consistent in the development world it has been that there are always people willing to keep iterating on libraries to get better and better implementations.
Well a lot of the reason other rust web frameworks were lacking was that actix-web was so dominant in the space. If the actix-web project is indeed dead, some other projects (such as warp/tower) will get more attention and hopefully become more feature-complete.
