When it was created, it was a different time. There was a sense of community around open source, much more tightly nit. And the more socially minded you are, the more vulnerable you are to these kind of attacks.
And sure, I understand why people feel a responsibility. And it's fine to take this responsibility too. I'm just saying: there is no need to.
The entire point of this Free Software/Open Source is to give people the freedom to do whatever you want with some piece of software, without having to be beholden to the original author. That's pretty much the entire point.
Anyone in the world can be a maintainer for xz. By forking it and applying useful patches.
It was almost 20 years ago, and no, I generally agree with the person you're responding to that OSS has changed significantly in these regards since the early-to-middle 2000s.
I'm not even disagreeing with the rest of your take, just poking at this idea that time hasn't passed and changed things. Some days I look around our industry and feel like it's nowhere near the one I was working in before.
It was definitely another world. I do agree that maintainership issues were already there, but I think they were smaller in number. Between the explosion of projects and the explosion of users, they are now on a different scale.
The others I don't know, but MySpace was not a particularly big operation. Before WordPress, most sites started as PHP at some point were expected to migrate to something else, because maintainability of PHP3/4 projects was a big challenge (hence the "shame"). Facebook was the first company that simply refused to do that, and focused on improving PHP instead.
What PHP lacked and Ruby had was rails like framework , the team from 37signals singlehandedly shifted the momentum out of PHP with their work on rails.