I find that the DOTS stack is very much worked on, witness the last release of entities 17 and related packages.
This is basically an entirely new way of thinking. They are effectively rewriting the whole engine.
I don’t know when the first unity version was ever released (or when it’s development started for that matter) but I don’t think we can expect a full feature coverage in just a few years.
As for the road map, it may not be clear in their communication but I think that there are 2 distinct road maps one for the “Unity Engine” and one for the “DOTS stack”.
With so much people relying on the Unity engine, they can’t just stop everything and focus only on DOTS.
The packages were removed from the package manage r in order to avoid misleading teams into starting a project with DOTS without being fully aware of it’s current state and feature set.