Yes it's stressing and time demanding. But you are absolutely right about how the maintainers treat other people.
At least it is open source. There are quite some closed-source projects that ran into troubles and basically disappeared.
I am not sure how they will react since the fork gained some attention now. However it's not my intention to let them look bad in any kind or act like I am better. All I want is a working solution where contributions by the community are acknowledged. But my attempt to openly point that out (issue youtube-dl dying?) basically got ignored and closed.