Yes, but very few actually will.

It requires someone who is already invested in the software, preferably using it themselves and also has the skills to keep the development going.

Unless the software is fairly niche it’s not uncommon. For example a better maintained fork of youtube-dl made front page just yesterday.

For every youtube-dl there are a dozen that just fade away into obscurity.

The creator no longer cares or uses the software themselves. Maybe they hand off the repo to someone else, who in turn gets crushed under the load and disappears.

I think once the software reaches some critical mass of users it won’t suffer from this problem. So maybe you just use more niche software than me because to me lack of maintainers hasn’t been a problem in practice.