He could, but I agree with his logic that overall quality of the codebase could degrade without his attention to core. The core project is a result of his ideas

He could, but I agree with his logic that overall quality of the codebase could degrade without his attention to core. The core project is a result of his ideas and vision, so having others jump in and take over would be difficult. Parse is in a similar state. Stable, maintained by the community, but no longer under a company umbrella. It had a lot of promise, and it's unfortunate Facebook decided to spin it down. A lot of these tools will fall to the wayside as other more efficient, shiny tools replace them, i.e. Angular 1. In general, tool turnover is quite high in the Javascript community. I would expect Hapi to share the same fate as every other Javascript framework that stopped being actively maintained.