It happened to a few maintainers I know. These companies save millions in development cost on the back of a few developers in developed countries. This is open source, I get it, but this isn't fair either.
Look at that comment:
> ....yikes. Sounds like a fork needs to happen. And github should really look to provide a 'risk' rating to projects from a maintenance PoV... a project depended on by 4.5m users with 1 maintainer should visualise as a high-risk dependency.
It's not up to GitHub to do that, it's up to the individual or the company to audit a project and its dependencies and be prepared to be able to maintain it themselves. Or pay the only developer to do exactly that.
Another comment (quoted by another guy):
> Babel maintainer here We are probably not going to fork core-js because we don't have enough resources to maintain it.
And people expect a single developer to have the resources to do exactly that? look at babel and the list of sponsors, yet they don't have the resources: