This forum has tens of thousands of active users, and if we mark a crowdfunded project as dead (and it isn't), we can kill that project anyway. We don't know the developer, we don't know their life, we don't know their current situation. They could be lying, or they might be telling the truth.
We don't know.
And so we give a developer the benefit of the doubt. From what I've seen on the forum, that means we don't tag a project as dead or abandoned for at least a year after it stops updating, unless a developer explicitly says it's been abandoned. Doing anything else can cause significant harm to a developer who might just be in a bad spot already.
I'd hate to live in a world where nobody believed you're sick, just because being sick is a convenient way to avoid work. And I somehow doubt you'd like that either.