But the current maintainer has the Apple provided signing cert, that's the whip hand in this whole deal.
I personally don't blame this fellow and in fact apluad him. To many companies exploit OSS maintainers. I think it's great to see someone turn it around for once.
So apply for a new signing cert? The only thing I'm hearing is "he closed and I don't want him to close it but forking it takes a lot of effort and I don't want to put in that effort".
If nobody is willing to put even the basic effort of applying for a new signing cert, color me skeptical that they'll actually maintain the entire project including the apparently voluminous changes needed to work with Catalina.
I hate nothing more than people who complain something isn't open source but want it to be maintained by someone else's time and effort. People's time isn't free, and they have no obligation to give you their current or previous time for nothing. (Not talking about you personally, referring to the guy in the original post)