You can call it a bait but where is VCs due diligence for this. Most VCs where out there defending their infra layers investment. Just look at YC batches and see the inflated number of infra startups.
"Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"!
The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerks and/or grifting losers. It's not the VC's fault.
While most startups fail eventually, failure in less than a year with over 7 million dollars is not the expected median. It’s the exact sort of thing that due diligence is supposed to prevent.
Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.
That's why either VCs confused moat with bot farms and farmed stars over solving genuine problems or they just blindly invested based on founders track record no matter what. To me both are really by product vibe coding hype and chatgpt killing wrappers.
If people are complaining then it means that they must've found it to be of value. If they found it to be valuable enough that they really want work done on it again, they can always do that work themselves (or hire someone to). There is 0 connection between forking and successful monetization.