[wrren]

I feel sympathy for the maintainer here, but at the same time I feel as though they've cultivated a very unhealthy relationship with the users of this project. If the users aren't paying you, you really don't owe them anything and you certainly don't need to apologise for prioritizing your own mental health and happiness over users' demands.

It's a different story if you're being paid to do some work, then you hold a degree of responsibility, demarcated by contract, for the thing you're working on. In the case of open source, however, that's not the case and it's absolutely your right to minimise or drop your support for a project at any time.