and frankly people got really pushy about a thing they don’t even pay for

He doesn't owe anyone anything, and he can decide to run his open source project just as he pleases, but it could have gone so much better. People are mostly just disappointed, I feel like.

It seems like his health condition got bad enough that he quite literally prioritised his life.

I hope he's well.

What I saw over there was a large portion of his community pleading with him to delegate administrative tasks to the community, as it became increasingly clear the website was becoming too much for a single guy to manage (he was the only moderator of like 30+ communities that were full to bursting with spam, as well as the sole site admin). He never approved the many applications to help moderate, and said he was extremely slow to trust others, so never appointed a second admin, and instead just continued to silently work on the codebase as the site became unusable from spam.

I think his extreme distrust and desire to do everything himself combined with his medical issues led to extreme burnout, and ultimately its downfall.

I mean... Maybe some exceptions, but I don't feel like the community was being too pushy.

Stuff happens in life, people get that, but I don't feel like it's too much to ask for an update about what's going on more than once every other month and while we appreciate him trying to handle everything, when he can't, there needs to be some effort at creating a backup plan. And... then finally when people stepped up to offer to help him, he didn't appreciate them, ignored their efforts and pushed them out (which is why we have mbin).