Is neard (the userland counterpart to the linux nfc stack) dead?

Question

I am currently dabbling into NFC on linux, and I found that everyone today seems to use libnfc and its ecosystem, which afaik interacts directly with the device via usbfs, without much kernel involvement. I know that there is also a kernel subsystem for nfc (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/net/nfc), and its corresponding userland part is neard (https://github.com/linux-nfc/neard).

I find that I very much prefer the latter's approach (kernel drivers, interface, netlink) over libnfc's direct access via usbfs, but somehow it seems to me that neard isn't very much alive, is that correct? Ubuntu (and possibly other distros) apparently seems to have stopped providing packages for it a while ago, and there aren't exactly that many commits on github either. Also I tried to build and install it from source, but I haven't managed to get it to work, apparently for dbus reasons (although I admit I am a huge dbus noob and a somewhat more skilled person possibly could have gotten it to work).

Does anybody by chance know more about the state of this project and possibly even how to get it to work under Ubuntu? Or are we now condemnded to do anything NFC related via usbfs?