Not really. If there are other maintainers who have ownership of the project they can just unarchive it themselves. If not, then he'd have to appoint a successor first, which would mean doing more work for free. So the best solution is just to archive it and let the community fork it if they're interested in continuing development.

Also your phrasing of "would be fine" implies that there are things that are not "fine" to do when doing work for free for the public benefit, which is exactly the sort of entitled attitude that makes many (myself included) uninterested in open sourcing their own projects.