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.