The original maintainer (creator) did an excellent job for 10+ years. Here is his response: https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/issues/992#issuecomment-683...
From my own experience, if I've been away from a project for a while sometimes there's this snowball of guilt that just keeps building up, and if there's people saying "hey what the hell?" it just adds to it. Understanding that and making sure there's no implied accusation can go a long way to getting someone to break their silence.
It's nice to see users of an abandoned project happy that it's because the developer (apparently) abandoned it, as long as he's okay.