By that account an open source project never dies because the code is there for anyone to improve upon. Why does anyone care if one particular repo realization

By that account an open source project never dies because the code is there for anyone to improve upon. Why does anyone care if one particular repo realization of some useful idea or its maintainers are around or not? It's quite some value judgment and worldview to divide open source into autistic maintainers who do even if no one uses and asshole users who do not and cannot do.