This is such an impressively pragmatic and generative thing to do!
tl;dr: they’re winding down one of their big oss projects (`rip`) because something more featureful came along that met their criterias. Now they can attend to other adjacent issues in their ecosystem.
This move strikes me as a very enlightened response to the emergence of uv. There’s no shortage of other problems to solve! Kudos to Prefix & co.
Very excited to hear this! Congrats!