I believe if there is some buzz here and people say they are interested maybe the DEV will get interested or another DEV might step up

I was the lead developer and I'm not working on it anymore.  I'm  not aware of anyone who works on Horizon.
The Slack community https://nhzheroes.slack.com is also dead for a long time.
I didn't know that there were efforts to fork Horizon or efforts to take over the development responsibility. At least no one contacted me.

At the moment I only see 3 running nodes. All 3 have the same height as https://hz-services.com/wallet/index.html.

Horizon, more precisely my node, is artificially kept alive. In my view Horizon is dead excluding any fork I'm not aware of.