I've released version 1.1.19 of plocate; this was mostly to get compatibility with liburing 2.4 out the door. The fix (an external contribution; thanks!) had lingered in git for a while, but evidently, onw it's reached distributions and more people were starting to notice.
On a related notice, the user base seems to be growing, and also changing a bit. I usually say that as an open-source maintainer, what you want isn't users; you want patches. Users generally come with questions and bugs, and you don't really care that much about the latter because they didn't affect you and you feel like you have an obligation to fix it.
In the early days of plocate, what I'd get was indeed patches; not that many and none large, but the ones that I'd get would be high-quality fixes by way of git-send-email that I could just apply and get on with my day. This is the ideal situation. But as time now goes by, I tend to get more and more requests and/or complaints and/or people who haven't actually read the manual; e.g., a common case is how btrfs subvolumes as configured on some distributions trips up updatedb's bind mount detection (because btrfs subvolumes are indeed implemented by bind mounts, and since you can use subvolumes for pretty much everything, it's impossible to know which ones should be included and which ones should not). Another increasingly common case is people who have unusual local setups that they want large plocate changes for. Some of them go away when I try to explain that implementing their changes are nontrivial (sometimes highly so), some don't. I interpret this as plocate slowly reaching mass market status, to the degree any Linux command-line tool can be said to have that.
plocate has long been a “finished” product; it does basically what mlocate does, just much faster, and that's it. I don't intend to do more with it except fixes, unless I hit on something that really annoys me again, and I don't really think a lot of things need to be done within that framework either. So congrats, I'm the owner of a dead program that only now gets users, who discovered that the product exists way too late to actually influence its direction. It's nice to be an open-source maintainer =)