This sounds like one of those Whisper fake stories or a r/thathappened post, especially with the "suffice to say" and the smiley at the end.
I used ZF2 during the beta, and the activity on SO, their IRC and their forums were high even then, so I can't say I recognize what you say about the scarce community.
I also used ZF2 for a project (shortly after release) and I agree with your assessment of the community: there was clearly a lot of interest and contributions.
That being said, I also agree with carrja99's comments regarding the complexity and defects. Many things felt unfinished, and documentation was pretty poor if you wanted to step outside the boundaries of what was covered in their example applications (which was unfortunately necessary for my project). I ended up reading a great deal of framework code for that project.
I'm not doing PHP at the moment, but I don't think I'd even consider ZF3 at this point given how many other strong frameworks are available.
I used ZF2 during the beta, and the activity on SO, their IRC and their forums were high even then, so I can't say I recognize what you say about the scarce community.