I hope that the author Benjamin Sago is alright. It's always concerning when FOSS developers disappear for a while - even though it isn't uncommon.

I wish there was a better way for the community to handle this situation without the original author doing what we see here. Sometimes the original author dies unexpectedly for example and it's very hard to salvage the work into a maintained fork.

I wrote about this in 2018: https://kodare.net/2018/06/25/salvaging-abandoned-projects.h...

Sometimes, perhaps, but https://github.com/eza-community/eza looked pretty easy, and they even had push access to change the exa repository to point to it.