Is this really necessary? Can't other maintainers simply fork the project and start working on it? People will eventually realize the fork is the only version that's still active and it will become the canonical version.
ZBar is an example of this. Nowadays it is maintained by Mauro Carvalho Chehab, a Linux kernel developer. Found out about this fork because it's the source of my Linux distribution's zbar package. Ended up contributing some code to it.
Well, you ask "is this really necessary?" and then go on to say "people work around it by doing a bunch of work", so I think that's the answer to your question.
ZBar is an example of this. Nowadays it is maintained by Mauro Carvalho Chehab, a Linux kernel developer. Found out about this fork because it's the source of my Linux distribution's zbar package. Ended up contributing some code to it.