So, if we squint, we see a single overworked engineer who couldn't get enough funding to keep his project going, and the project falling into disrepair, with knowledge lost after he is gone...

Now what does this remind me of...

(Yes, yes, he did get funding enough to actually build it, unlike many, and certainly had a lot of people working on implementing it... and yet, the analogy with an OSS maintainer seems a little too close)