@readsteven this really seems like making a mountain of a molehill unless I'm really missing something

The projects are maintained in distributed version control, so someone ought to have it even if gitlab deleted it. If it needs to be archived for posterity, the are better solutions for that (eg software heritage archive). Also, I didn't see that they're deleting without warning, but with months of warning.

even if the maintainer died, as Willison (quoted in the followup article) suggested could happen, they should have put together some plan to make sure their important project would have a caretaker who could do things like prevent deletion