And I can understand that. It's totally reasonable for a project creator to not want to support it for decades.

This is a huge risk for any single-person project. If they lose interest, get busy, die, or are otherwise unavailable, the entire project is unmaintained, and it's really hard for others to pick up the pieces at that point, when there is no expert to ask for help.

One of the side benefits to opening issues and submitting merge requests is that the maintainer doesn't feel like they're all alone. (The main benefit is that you are more likely to get the fix/feature you want into the codebase.)

Even just going through existing bug reports and testing them to see if you can reproduce the issue is significant. Provide minimal steps to reproduce if you can.

At least fiatjaf marked their git repo as archived and put a sentence in the README explaining the project's current state. I appreciate that.