Their latest stable/official releases are indeed lagging. One of the things openwrt does (for good and bad) is to spend a lot of time testing and stabilizing before a release.

Many people therefore prefer to run the nightly builds to get a (much) more up to date build. It may sound scary, but it's not really.

Anyway: openwrt is definitely not dead, definitely safe and I consider it about the only routing firmware I fully trust.