The problem is that people don't recognize the efforts of the ones who do it. Antirez did it for years. Do people expect someone to have the same very high-profile job with constant overtime and the same project for their entire lives? His efforts to stay on that project were heroic.
There are lots of other people who want to maintain it. Let them, and if they screw it up that is not his fault. He finished his project. Give him a break.
I think everybody wants it on their resume, but the practical day to day work tends to be more filtering poorly written GitHub issues than writing any interesting code. For a job that doesn't pay much (often at all), that's not something I would want to spend my time doing.
But there is DEFINITELY something wrong with the fact that, seemingly, NOBODY wants to be a software maintainer.