I don’t think anyone but you ever said he was irrelevant, or bragged about not knowing who he was. You’re extracting a ton of meaning to a short comment which I just don’t think is actually there

https://socialblade.com/youtube/handle/asmontv says there’s over thousand youtube channels with more subscribers than him. He might well be large & influential in his niche, but it’s unlikely that people outaide his niche will know who he is. Do you think you’ve heard of 1,000 biggest youtubers whose channels aren’t about things you’re interested in?

Pewdiepie, by comparison, is the 12th most subscribed channel on youtube. I think you’re underestimating how much more famous that makes him with the general public.

And they’re not going to pay millions to be the default for a browser that no one uses.

The email address attached to the public key, eng@eightsleep.com, to me suggests the private key is likely accessible to the entire engineering team.

This assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the authors argument that this is a big deal.

Here’s an Olympic sprinter powering a toaster. He generates 0.021kWh going flat out: https://youtu.be/S4O5voOCqAQ

It’s a quite entitled view to take that they should make an effort to pass the project on. It would be very hard to build sufficient trust in a new developer quickly, and passing it on without that trust would be undermining the trust that users of the projects have placed in this dev. If I were him, I wouldn’t be staking my reputation on finding someone to take over from me if there wasn’t already an obvious candidate.

The successful fundraiser you mention looks to have had a target of $12k USD (from: https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/divestos-is-unsustainable-needs-community-support-we-sent-250-and-you-can-help-too/6660, the original page has been taken down), and was as a alternative to them taking a full time job. I’d say its a reasonable bet that money was spent on living expenses, and IMO $12k a year is much less than this level of skilled work is worth. It’s certainly not enough money to make it unreasonable to shut down the project a year later, and I doubt anyone who donated feels shortchanged by it.