https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligation
My first guess was "chief data officer".
Specifically, it was a piece of partial ownership on a bunch of mortgages in 2008. The issue here is that when the junk mortgages defaulted, the CDO also went sideways [1]
In any case, what the author is thinking about is more "systemic risk" (think leftpad or cascading DNS failures) rather than debt-based analogies. One big reason 2008 became such a big mess was the systemic issues, not building products on debt [2]
1. Fun fact - before 2008, they had started making CDOs out of CDOs because of of the insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed financial products. When mortgages are underwritten for people withouth a job, and packaged in a product with a AAA credit rating, it turns out it's a profitable thing to sell.
2. Also the fact that Lehman and Bear Sterns had leverage ratios in the 30x-40x range, which is insane.
Whereas in the 2018 crisis, junk debt was rolled into CDOs but there were no 'knobs' the bankers could turn to actually improve the fundamentals of the junk debt. By repackaging the debt they did not get any right to fix the bad actors that made it bad. Things were actually bad, and when it defaulted there was insufficient firewall to prevent the contagion from affecting the encapsulating derivative.
Of course it is up to the maintainer but by absorbing an abandoned project, they are actually reducing the amount of unmaintained code, versus simply hiding it.
Probably the more accurate analogy to 2018 would be if a private equity firm started a company you could pay to upgrade the rating of an unmaintained Rust package, but no actual change happened and all they did was swap labels on things until the problematic rating disappeared.