See my comment above, mostly all active core devs from sktime at that time left or had to leave to the aeon project

aeon is based on sktime==0.16.0

Darts is a commercial FOSS, aeon is community driven. Also aeon is more following scikit-learn.

Aeon is an sktime fork which happened after one of the sktime core developers (Franz K.) took hostage of the sktime project by kicking out other core devs from the GitHub. Its info you can collect from some GH issues