I'm not sure I get the drama. The beauty of FOSS is that nothing usually stops you from just forking the project and continuing to maintain it the way you see

I'm not sure I get the drama. The beauty of FOSS is that nothing usually stops you from just forking the project and continuing to maintain it the way you see fit. If the original project is dead in the water, people looking for new releases or fixes will find you very soon and will be grateful. Just leave some links in the comments to the issues that you fixed in your fork and people will find it. I've done this several times and never really bothered to get an "official" redirection from the original project. In most of the cases, Google just picked it up and eventually prioritized my maintained fork over the original zombie, as people posted more and more links to it. A couple of times the original author noticed and shared a quick update of "hey, this dude is maintaining the project now, kudos to him, go to his site for the latest build".