@wired420 Try and put it in the scope of volunteers and size of the platform. The plugin directory is not "dying off" at all but you may misunderstand the size of the job.
There are 33,565 in the repo and every single one of them was originally vetted by that small team of volunteers. They are doing that work on their free time for the benefit of the community.
While it takes you only 5 minutes to generate a small plugin, it goes into a queue with hundreds of other submissions. It really is first come first serve and some of those submissions are thousands of lines of code to review. And that team also fields any and all plugin complaints at the same time.
In that scale and light the work that they do isn't embarrassing at all. It's awesome. ;)