Ask HN: Should old open repos owned by big tech be handed over?
I've seen countless open-source projects dead with huge volume of people wanting it keep it alive, whats the best course of action other than "fork it"?
No. Just fork it.
This usually comes up when nobody in the "huge volume of people wanting it keep it alive" wants to become a maintainer. There's no solution to that.
But if there's a bunch of people using it, well, somebody needs to step up or at least offer to pay for ongoing maintenance if the original company abandons it. The hard part is finding people willing to do that work.