This situation only happens when you hand the responsibility of managing a critical domain to a single person, and you forget about it for ages.
This is hardly a "hostage" situation, specially when the reason flagged is lack of support. I mean, this scenario only happens due to lack of support to begin with.
But in my opinion if you want to earn money, then you should look for some sort of employment, and not be a volunteer in a project that's very famous about being built by volunteers, and demand to be paid (or else). If you don't want to be an unpaid volunteer anymore (which is a very fair thing to do), there are much more graceful ways to achieve that.
'Actually, I had added a sentence in my email signatures for almost a year:
``` -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/> Looking for a remote C programming job at the moment. ``` (e.g.: <https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/ZgifHQoTaDEiga0W@debian...>) '
does that qualify as 'looking for some sort of employment' ?
> A: Hey man, how is it going?
> B: Not good, have been without a job for over a year :(
> A: Aww... what happened? Did recruiters stop using LinkedIn? Or you made your profile private?
> B: Nah, I have no LinkedIn profile...
> A: Gotcha, M$ is a pest. The how many CVs have you sent?
> B: 0. I don't believe in that.
> A: Then what did you do? Did you try to look for a job at all?
> B: Of course! I put a new signature in my emails. And then I barely sent an email to anyone.
> A: That's 1 sentence, with a dead link.
> B: That's what I'm talking about, exactly. Even with the dead link, I still can't find any jobs...
You asked if putting a single sentence with a dead link in an email signature counts as job searching (putting that signature in emails by a person who barely sends emails, by his own admission).
And my answer was "are you kidding me"?
I hope this helps.