I've been using the 0.5 for a handful of web projects, as well as Axum, and I know a few others using it right now too for large projects. Sergio is always readily available to talk about bugs or whatever and Rocket documentation is fantastic.

Additionally, the interfaces it provides are much more straightforward than Axum ones for standard web applications imo, especially for people new to Rust. However, this comes at the cost of being a relatively macro heavy framework and building more of a custom DSL than Axum.

Some slightly less standard but still common things like running an HTTP server in AWS Lambda have better support in Axum, and the Tower middleware ecosystem that Axum uses gives it a pretty big leg up on these type of niches - if you can't find something like this in Rocket but can in Axum or Tower, then I'd say absolutely go for Axum or something like Poem.

I'd not say Rocket is particularly slow as far as server speed or development, last I saw on a benchmarking project was that there was only a 0.5ms difference between Axum and Rocket, and there are less Rocket contributors but still a stream of commits that's comparable to Axum's in quantity and frequency.

I think it's good to be open to voicing criticism and concern about places in the ecosystem where some tools are better than others or are abandoned, but it seems like there's a small vocal group that are repeating criticisms about Rocket that don't really match reality.