I am sorry to hear about the author's issues, but I do think it's a little dramatic to call this being rude and applying pressure. The person pretty clearly stated some basic and legitimate questions, offered support, etc.

I think it would behoove open-source developers who are sensitive to dealing with potential users and collaborators to more clearly state and set expectations on the repository's README. Many authors clearly like to use open-source packages they maintain as a sort of professional portfolio, which is perfectly fine, and this author even asks for paid support at the bottom of the README. Is it really out of line to ask about the status if it is not otherwise clear?

All of these little scuffles from maintainers towards contributors and users are often from lack of communication and expectation setting on the side of the maintainer(s) and code owner(s), although contributors and users can also be demanding. I think the issue is that everyone has their version of expectations in their head but not everyone shares those. It's the same as with any human communication, so the more information the better.

I think there is a bit of a mismatch between advertising code, asking for paid support, etc. and then being upset at activity in the repo without more clear guidelines. I have seen plenty of repositories that very clearly state that they won't accept pull requests, they won't accept anything but the simplest of bug fixes, that this library is really just for the author's use but it is being open sourced in case it's useful to someone else. That's a good example of setting expectations that provides more context than pointing to a license.