I don't think I understand that response. If a project is forked that could very well be someone deciding to base their work on another's work without regard to the parent code editor's attitude. I could make my own GNU Emacs fork, for instance, just because I wanted to. I don't have to wait for someone to "step down as maintainer" nor do I have to wait for a project to appear to be unmaintained. I can compete against GNU Emacs by building my variant on the same code. Anyone can choose from the published forks and there is no need for the one maintainer per project approach your comment suggests (nor does one maintainer per project exist).

I don't share that objection to forks; I don't find forks to be a problem. One can't do anything to change in the free software world, nor would I want it to change because changing that would mean losing the software freedom I value.