That's not what they meant at all, don't be obtuse. The community exists around the project (in this case the repo and associated website etc). If you fork it then you have to hope that the community follows you to your fork and that then everyone coalesces around it. This isn't guaranteed to work though, so passing the existing project onto a new maintainer is a much better way of retaining the existing community. That is what was meant when talking about the community.
The earlier comment is concerned for the users being orphaned by the project they used. The project is concerned with protecting the trust the users placed in the project by using it.
To trivialize the concern of the project seems worse because it prioritizes convenience in a particularly sticky area (security/privacy) as well as forcing a less informed choice on the user (who they are trusting).
There's probably a nice parallel here where we consider the NRL's role in Tor and how FOSS practices, EFF funding, and transparency meant it preserved user trust.
