If it's an open source project that has been used by others, please consider giving out maintainer access to others (now or later).
It's sad, when projects are abandoned and a whole bunch of users would be willing to (partially) maintain it, but the key holder implicitly or explicitly decided that nobody else should have access.
Forks are not he same: It's very hard to get enough traction with existing users and the discoverability is terrible.
Kindly disagree. If I don't want to work on a project anymore, I also don't want to spend time finding a new maintainer, or just take the responsibility to endorse a random person on the internet.
A fork solves that. And potential maintainers willing to work together on a fork can open an issue and talk about it. The reality being that more often than not, people think that they are willing to keep maintaining it, but in practice they just won't.
I feel uneasy about this after the xz story.