And frankly I don't buy the story that they wanted to put the code on their own repository anyways, seems more like a concession because the other contributors also hold some copyright.
If your workflow relied on a package being delivered every morning, even unchanged, it's your own fault. He never made that guarantee.
Stop painting the narrative like people owe you anything, when you're just failing to correctly evaluate the actual resiliency (non-)guarantees of production pipelines based on random github repositories.
And yes shockingly people are entitled to be treated fairly and not to be sabotaged. And no, providing them with a library for a limited period of time and then being fed up with it's maintenance doesn't somehow earn you that right. It gives you the right to walk away, but clearly thats wasn't enough for the author.
But hey if you want that to live and bathe in that kind of toxicity, enjoy!
What they did was climb through everyones window to get the cardboard box back, just as with the npm leftpad incident.
Stop painting the narative like people demand some volunteer to do more free work, when all they do is ask to not be actively sabotaged.