If that's the case, it's not really about it being "understaffed". Instead, it's doomed to rot until it's replaced of rewritten. There's no scenario where more maintainers will help, except for marginally delaying it.
The good news is that there are almost perfect replacements out there, and most of them are leaner.
I've seen how that mindset has ruined several companies. Not saying that you're wrong about that particular program that is, after all, free software replaced by other free software parts. But for business, it's lethal.
Joel Spolsky had a nice piece about it:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
That and Fire and Motion seem to be forgotten wisdom already:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
I feel old :-)
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/tree/src
A few 2kLOC files and the rest is rather small.
If you want a rethinking of the idea: zellij.
I prefer the latter. It matches my mental model of such things, and lots of people talk about enjoying switching to it. Many others happily use the former daily.
I've had some luck with mosh, but that also seems kind of moribund.
For my use case it's fine.
I guess, but does it really get in the way?
I use tmux only for scrollback and having multiple "tabs" and sessions, and not much else. But the more advanced stuff like splits and whatnot never really get in my way.