What if you do find a critical bug after you started using it, and there is no one around that can help you with it?
Of course there will be some maintainers who are simply not interesed or unable to offer paid support (e.g. due to their employer being a control freak) but that's ok. As others have pointed out, forking / maintaining out of tree patches (and providing them to others) is not inherently hostile.
For you it is.
But for a maintainer, reviewing and accepting a pull request can still be a lot of work, especially if the code has been stable for a long time.