I mean...

Only if you assume the author would have actually maintained it in the first place. I'm fairly unconvinced that a guy who puts his mail order bride in charge of the company that released the FS is going to be doing much more work on it.

Said more bluntly - it's an unfinished project of a man who had moved on to other things already. It wasn't valuable enough for someone to pick up. So it's getting removed.

It happens to be particularly spicy that the "Other things" he moved on to were murder/prison, but not really related to the code other than as a "hey - this is a crazy aside" moment.

IIRC, the lack of maintenance predated the murder; the development was focused on reiser4, basically abandoning reiser3, and for that reason there was a higher resistance against merging reiser4, since the kernel maintainers didn't want to risk it being merged and soon abandoned in favor of something else. It didn't help that, IIRC, reiser3 had some unusual locking, being one of the last parts of the kernel which depended on the unusual properties of the Big Kernel Lock.