>Your downstream should be precious

Is my downstream paying me for the maintenance ?

If not, downstream may maintain mold2 themselves forever because their _extremely specific_ use case is neither a promise nor a valuable thing for mold to maintain. Debian understood this a while ago and isn't whining when they have to maintain their own fork. Maintainers maintain.

If enough downstreamers are unhappy about choices, they are also welcome to fork, until the base project is abandoned. Or they realize their usecases are extremely narrow.

(In addition, it's an extremely hypocritical and purist demand, because I am pretty certain that their distribution has, at some point, an arbitrary executable to make a compiler from. So they're probably okay with blobs, just not that one in particular.)