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Which is a strange concern because the solution is obvious: if the project is popular, it should be easy to find someone else to pass on the leadership position to and move on to other things.

The only guilt should come from just straight up abandoning the project. Unfortunately the open-source world is chock full of those.

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Why should someone feel guilty because they made something, shared it to the world, but one day realized they didn't want to or couldn't continue to maintain it?

To suggest I should feel guilt for admitting I can't maintain all the personal code I've opensourced for other users suggests I ought to have kept it closed source, which seems like a net loss all around.

I'm not asking people to never abandon their projects.

All you have to do is find someone else to lead (or at least maintain) the project before moving onto something else.

Indeed. I made a project a few years ago and maintained it for several years. At one point I just didn't have the time (or motivation, I suppose) to continue updates and essentially abandoned it without much official word, while putting in a good amount of work every few months. The guilt was pretty crushing, so I can understand where the author comes from.

Fortunately, someone offered to take it up recently so I feel much better now.

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