> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
Which you should happily abandon if you get bored.
If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.
It is very hard to just quit any hobby cold turkey if you have built your entire identity, your friendships, your social standing and in the case of FOSS even your employability around it.
Maintainers are human. That means their welfare matters. But that also means when the thing hurting them is the thing they have grown so attached to, they can't just walk away from it like throwing away a piece of expired bread.