If someone competent wanted to take over my important work projects (deployment systems, core code maintenance, etc.), I'd gladly hand them over. I could orphan them right now claiming I need time for immediate tasks, but I don't want to dump unmaintained code on my team. I'd guess open source maintainers feel even more responsible since they see their work as community service. Maybe dropping the project is what's needed to trigger a well-funded fork or get corporate attention, similar to how Heartbleed affected OpenSSL.