How do people keep finding and using it?
How do complaints or feature requests keep arriving?
Why is the published to an audience that doesn't exist?
Or is it fair to say the project has published in public, so has contact with a very broad community already?
It clearly does not, however the members of the community need to know their place.
The only point is that all the time that you and other selfless maintainers are spending on their projects is not something that anyone is entitled to; it's a gift, not a duty.
To actually conflict witht the essay you would need to hold that any developer that ever publishes a piece of software is not only duty-bound to maintain it forever, but also to engage with every potential (crackpot) user or collaborator, and that's simply not a defensible perspective to me.