This is a pretty immature community IMO. The gogs maintainer just has life sometimes and they want to fork because he leaves some PRs open for a while. Learn some patience, the project will be better off for it.
This is not the reason of the fork. The reason is that he refuses to give more people write access to the project to keep it going.
Before the first time he went AFK, he even removed write access from the 2 or 3 other people that had it.
Others don't need write access "to keep the project going" unless they intend to ship releases without him/her- they can make PRs and the maintainer will merge them when they are back. Perhaps the Gitea committers want a more predictable release cadence?
I agree that a fork is probably the best solution here, due to the impedance mismatch, the forkers don't seem to be fans of the BDFL model. Additionally, "community" is a much wider term than how you used it, it's not just other contributors but also includes users and bug reporters. I wish Gitea the best of luck, but I'll remain a Gogs user.
what a stupid excuse, reminds me of people excusing the creator of Coffee Script because "Jeremy he was busy". if your work depends on an open-source project and the author "has life" so that critical bugs aren't resolved or important PR aren't merged then the only mature thing is to fork and let the maintainer get "life" as much as he wants. Because he is not irreplaceable