imo the site itself is not dead, only the forum is kinda.
The main use of trackbase is to track servers and the rating of players, and many people use those features daily, look which server has more players atm so they know where to connect, look how their rating increased/decreased, how much rating they still need to top 10 and such things.
The forum is mainly used for reporting/solving problems and when there are not many problems, there is not much forum activity.
Not sure how it was in the past tho since im only playing since 2010 :p