Laravel abandoned dependency issue

So I just took over a laravel 5.2 based project with some dependency hell.

The backend is build on a smarch/watchtower package which has been abandoned and laravel 5.3 is the highest version it supports. tsawler/laravel-filemanager is one more abandoned package.

Now I would like to update the whole project to the latest version of laravel to enjoy the new features, bug fixes and security patches and add the possibility to use other packages.

What are the best practices in such a situation?

1. Should I go with hijacking the abandoned packages one at a time and update them,
2. find similar packages with strong community support and replace the abandoned ones,
3. build the whole project from the start on a fresh copy of laravel 6
4. or accept the truth and continue on the old version?

any other suggestions?

Links to abandoned packages:

smarch/watchtower

tsawler/laravel-filemanager

via Chebli Mohamed