It would be really nice if people would use the features that let you have someone else maintain things so that this didn't have to happen all the time.

Well, yeah, wouldn't mind doing that. But this still would require the original mod owners to take action, somehow.

Thank you for uploading schoos! This is one of my top 10 mods for factorio and was itching for it to get updated but too lazy to do myself. Cheers!

Yeah, this wasn't so much a criticism of you. Thank you for doing this.

I'm debating offering to be a second. But mostly all I'd be willing to do is simple version updates or finding someone else who wanted to maintain it.

a github repo would be even better...

A github repo would be something, but it would not be even better. The main issue with all the ownership changes is that people keep on having to find the most recent name on the mod portal, and that's pretty irritating. But yes, I agree, there should be a github or osdn or some other public version control history of the thing as well.