why is NXT supposedly dieing 
NXT has been made hideously obsolete by Turing-complete technology such as ETH and rootstock.io.
And it never did anything useful to begin with.
It's just a scam platform for issuing scam assets.
It's also been forked to death, leaving it with almost no community or devs.
Eth and nxt are completely different platforms and as of now nxt has a far better package.