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I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.

Yeah that ability to use old code is great as an emergency escape hatch but it's not really a viable day-to-day document editing strategy.

What maintenance are you talking about? I'm quite sure I could open any document on my computer with a libreoffice version from ten years ago. The functionality doesn't magically rot away...

Security vulnerabilities for one obvious example

The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.

For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.

They will keep it for a while, but it is now named Collabora Office. That's where the development is happening.