There's a similar effort in the Python / Django world called Jazzband (https://jazzband.co/). This model will probably become more and more necessary as maintainers need to move on from projects for whatever reason. Having a safe place to transfer a project to with a formal process (announcement of the change, code review before acceptance, etc.) would certainly help combat this issue.
Yes, I was inspired by Jazzband, but Jazzband has two things that led me to develop Code Shelter: It's pretty specific to Django, whereas I wanted something general, and people have to move their projects to the Jazzband org, which many people don't like doing (because they understandably want to keep their attribution).
With Code Shelter you don't have to move the project anywhere, you just give repo admin access to the app and the app can add/remove maintainers as required.
There's obviously a corrective component as well, where maintainers who don't do a good job are removed, but this hasn't happened yet so it's not clear how it will be handled.