The commit history I looked through has multiple commits for something that should realistically be a single “linted the project” commit. It’s valid criticism in this case.

I don't agree. The trunk features multiple typo fixes and whatnot, but they are days apart and spread over weeks on end.

If anything, this shows that no one is contributing to the project, and people like the blogger wasted more effort writing posts on how no one is doing anything while they themselves do nothing at all, and to make matters worse they criticise the ones actually contributing something.

If the blogger really feels strongly about this, he should put their money where their mouth is and lead by example.

But why care? Open source work is volunteer work. I'm not saying it is above criticism, but if truly the only people willing and wanting to work on the project want to make the commits like that as opposed to a single one, who cares? If you strongly believe in topics like this and want to work on the project then go help them out. But like I said, if the only people who actually want to work on the project want to work on it like that, then who cares?

Does Apache have incentive for the project to seem alive when it isn't? Maybe? I don't know. Do I think they're trying to make it look alive? I feel pretty strongly they aren't.