Everyone likes to write new fresh code, not regurgitate old dead code by others.
That's why there's a gazillion projects all doing basically the same thing in slightly different ways.

If you have the choice to start a new project, join an existing project that's actively maintained and does almost what you want, or adopt some dead codebase that noone's touched in 2 years, which would you do?
Remember people will look at the sf pages for the dead project and see it's been dead for 2 years until someone picked it up again.
They'll likely decide to watch and see what happens before jumping on, leaving you to muddle on alone.
And that's IF you can get in contact with the original maintainer to get the administrator's password for the project so you can add yourself as a committer and administrator when that person has likely changed email addresses several times or if you're lucky just forgotten they ever started that project.