Grin is surely still a thing.
But unfortunately, gamblers estimating projects in terms of hype and money making (or loosing) not in terms of tech innovations, though it's hard to understand for non techy people which project is truly innovative among the ocean of shitcoins and scam coins.
Grin is the only altcoin which adds something interesting to Bitcoin and complements it, without sacrificing on security or decentralization.
Grin adds enhanced privacy and more scalable blockchain comparing to Bitcoin, with the tradeoffs of interactive transactions and non auditable coin supply (though the cryptography verifies no extra coins minted).
Grin itself is innovative and doesn't need to hype around adding new "features" just to satisfy gambling behavior of the masses.
The development is still ongoing, AFAIK, the most interesting feature is mwixnet, which is going to break linkability in transactions graph and put Grin into the fully privacy coins league, competing with Monero.
But the most exciting feature of Grin coin is ONE GRIN PER SECOND FOREVER. The most fair launch, without early users advantage, same distribution rate for all no matter when you joined the network. Even Bitcoin can't compete with that. The more time past, the more Grin become valuable due to fair distribution.