Despite the blog post, hapi.js has only 8 open issues, 2 of which are bugs. Seems like they've done a good job maintaining a stable framework.
I've been working on a popular open source project for 3 years and I have no plans of stopping. There are only three conditions which would cause me to quit:
1. People stop using it.
2. I become physically/mentally incapacitated.
3. I die.
Also, I'm sure someone from the community would step up and take over of the project if I got hit by a bus.
I think that there is no correlation (single person vs corporation); there are pros and cons in both cases. Hapi was backed by Walmart Labs (corporation). SailsJS started running into issues with their community precisely when things started to get commercial.
I think that a lot of popular 'single person' (started by a single person) projects might actually last longer because the original authors tend to feel more responsible to the people/companies who have entrusted them personally. Also, in the single-person scenario, the author might perceive 100 users as being a lot; while a corporation might think that 10K users is not a lot.
Small projects not backed by corporations are usually more tight-knit.
You're lucky if your job does not wear you down to the point at which this is the case; most people are not.
Once he left they probably felt like they had a team that could contribute to Hapi core themselves if needed, and had no desire to sponsor continued work on the project other than having employees spend time on features/fixes they required. I could be way off -- just a guess at their reasoning.
In this post he mentions, "Since I am no longer employed by a major corporation generous to pay me a salary to work on hapi,". That "major corporation" was Walmart.
edit: You can see it's old URL at walmart labs via archive.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20150101071959/http://walmartlab...
Sure, in the open source world nobody owes anybody anything. And it is the responsibility of the user to choose carefully the libraries he is going to use.
But when asked, creators often refuse to delegate, add contributors with merge rights ... so the project is abandoned and of course the issues accumulate on Github. Or someone forks the project and make it his own then the cycle continue.
That's personally why I stopped using Coffee-script for instance. "J is busy" was often used as an excuse to let things rot for 2 years... except it's a fn programming language people depend on... so busy J needs to delegate or give stewardship of the project to someone who has the time ...
It's obvious to me that a corporation backed or foundation backed opensource project is always preferable to one lead by a single person that will sooner or later abandon the whole thing.