That actually brings back (not only) my rouge idea of guerilla releasing 
Once I met a package that worked in Melodic without a single change, but the maintainers were totally unresponsive. So I thought about doing the Melodic release from an alternative release repo - I haven’t come up with any technical problem on the way (except ROS maintainers noticing that a non-maintainer of the package is doing the release)… But there were ethical concers which won in this case and stopped me from doing that However, there is now a process for taking over abandoned packages - if you’re willing to maintain them in the future: Releasing repositories form "other" people - #11 by k-okada - Packaging and Release Management - Open Robotics Discourse .