I don’t think this is right. It seems very sustainable as evidenced by 30+ years of sustained OSS development.
It seems very sustainable as we live in a time of the best OSS software ever produced with more high quality software than ever produced by ideological volunteers.
I’ve seen statements similar to yours and they just seem so at odds with reality.
The big question is what happens when a maintainer wants to retire and a successor can't be found? Or (as in this case), when a maintainer gets so annoyed by their users that they refuse to continue co-operating with their user base.
We don't really have an answer for either of these questions yet, and we won't bump into them until maintainers get old or angry. But we have been predicting that this problem will happen.
Now we're bumping into this problem, it's our new reality. What's the solution?
That’s there’s only been a few problems like this despite millions of users is a sign of strength.
I hedge by pinning yo specific versions and keeping my own package manager (RStudio) to keep mirrors if the packages I scan. That the packages are open source means they are easier to scan or fork.
If a maintainer stops then the project can be forked. If nobody wants to fork then that probably means no one cares enough. And that’s ok.
Mostly it forces us to be flexible. I don’t think software is a thing but a process or cycle.
If a thing has an expiry date that is >10 years, then you're not going to see any problems for 10 years. That doesn't mean the expiry date doesn't exist, or that the thing won't hit it. It can be wildly successful for all those years and then hit the expiry date and stop immediately.
I’ll take a decade of success as a sign of sustainability over a package maintainer losing their shit as a sign of h sustainability.
I for one enjoy if anyone makes money with help of my code. I very well know I wouldn't have made it so far without many many others having chosen this way before.
I'm happy to contribute code, or documentation, but that's not the same thing.
Focusing on the troubles of this one person is a mistake. Of course the more "unbalanced" individuals will crack first. But we should expect more and more to go the same way (not necessarily by sabotaging their code though).
This model of software development is unsustainable.