Just updated. Also found a bug that made that the Atomic Robots setting never had any effect. :-D
It would probably be worth mods.factorio.com administrators to add the ability to delegate the rights to administer those mods that their developers, for some reason, can no longer support.
Then it would be possible to do without unnecessary forks ...
I'm not sure that's really a good idea. Sometimes it takes a while until a mod is updated. It may seem dead, but eventually returns. For example, I've mods myself that haven't been updated for Factorio 1.1 yet, but finally released a new version for one of them just two days ago. Also, what should be the criteria to decide whether a mod isn't taken care of any longer? Simple mods that just add a recipe or scale some graphics will work almost forever without any further changes, so there's simply no reason to update them unless they become incompatible with the main game or another mod.
Also, while most mods come with a free license, there are mods like Industrial Revolution that have a very restrictive license. The administrators can't simply hand over the mod to anybody else just because it's a very popular mod the author has abandoned. If somebody wants to quit modding, they can look for collaborators, transfer ownership themselves, or put the mod under a free license. But you can't force anybody to do that.
