2007 was 17 years ago, and it was another world. This time 17 years ago, the iPhone had not been released. Facebook was still new and hot, the first big operation to be unashamedly built on PHP (!). GitHub didn't exist, opensource happened on mailing lists, Sourceforge, private Subversion repos.

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.