it’s never as simple as that. Sure you can take it over to continue maintaining it but you now also have to stay on top of git issues. I’ve known maintainers who are the only ones on a fork they took over so not only are they continuing to develop they’re now also the only one dealing with issue requests which can easily derail you from development. Sure there are ways to handle that and schedule it but a lot of people don’t do that and get burned out.

I mean I dealt with this myself. several months ago I built an extension for firefox that tied into lemmy and mastodon and I just abandoned it. I was spending more time dealing with users than actually working on it and just said screw it, this isn’t fun. So now I just make all my repos private.