Disagree, but respect your opinion.
Outside of SciML and DataFrames.jl the situation is very different, at least that is how I feel it. It would be great if we could nail down more examples of packages that died over the years because of lack of maintainers.
I will point out three somewhat recent major losses:
- Transducers.jl (Takafumi Arakaki disappeared and the framework is gone)
- LoopVectorization.jl (Chris Elrod was the main active maintainer)
- DelaunayTriangulation.jl (Daniel VandenHeuvel was the only maintainer)
People leave the community or decide to work on something else for valid reasons, and the packages die. Community members jump in to help replace the packages by new packages, but that is only a remediation, it doesn’t address the issue at the core.
Seeing this over the years, I really think that people should consider sponsoring projects they use daily if they cannot become a maintainer due to lack of skills.