Honestly, from reading this it seems like people blew it _way_ out of proportion. Someone forked the project to make updates because the original maintainer seemed to be not doing much, the original maintainer came back to say that they were correct to ask about maintenance because they didn't expect to do any more work due to health issues and then volunteered to transfer the crate to the person who forked on their own, which the person who forked it accepted.
It's kind of bizarre to me because I don't really understand what mental model could lead to not taking any action earlier than this if the was things turned out is so upsetting. If they were happy to keep using it exactly as is because no updates were needed, why not just pin the dependency to that version exactly (and republish their own fork if they were worried about old versions being "yanked" and not being able to use it for anything new or offline)? If they did expect some form of updates over time, where did they expect them to come from when the existing maintainer felt they were unable to continue given health issues? Any attempt to find some other solution to future ownership would be heavily scrutinized by the exact people who commented on this issue with strong opinions and don't seem to have much empathy for the health issues, which would defeat the entire purpose of trying to take time away from work for their health.
I'm surprised that this needs to be said, expecting people to put in extra work to project you from what happens to their projects when they literally can't keep maintaining them due to health issues will never work, and it's also just an awful way to treat people. If you have serious concerns about how situations like this could be exploited by malicious actors, you should be paying much closer attention to the status of your dependencies and taking actions to insulate yourself from potential fallout long before some like this happens. If you've gotten to this point under the assumption that you can just veto any change in ownership that you don't trust, you're already too late.