they are correct that it has not been updated for a couple of years.
I am just a moderator here, and not a bbpress author.
The authors tend to release updates every few years, rather than more frequently.
My personal view is that you should consider bbpress to be a ‘mature’ product, ie any releases will be to fix issues rather than add functionality.
bbpress is written really well, and has loads of hooks. There are no show stopper bugs in it, it may throw a few deprecation notices (and these are very few at the moment), but WordPress recommends that you should not show error messages in live sites.
I currently have my test site running WordPress 6.4.x and php 8.2 with no issues.
The only major issue with bbpress at the moment is that it does not work well with FSE themes.
However my bbp style pack plugin has fixes for this
bbp style pack
as well as block versions of the widgets and a ton of styling and functionality add-ons.
All plugins are subject to the authors commitment, and bbpress is no different.
The main WordPress support forums use bbpress, and it would be mega work to move those over to some other product.
Robin, thank you for an informative and direct answer to my question – as you normally do. I’ll just ignore the WF warning and continue on. The bbp style pack also works great.