Okay but… it looks like he made 9 times as many commits as the second most frequent committer and 6 times as many as the top two combined. Who do you suppose he should hand it off to?
This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.
No, absolutely not. That's precisely how you end up with bad actors inserting malware into FOSS projects they've taken over.
If a maintainer doesn't want to continue a project, and there's no existing contributor who has demonstrated both the qualifications and interest in taking over a project, the responsible thing to do is archive it – not give committer rights to some rando.
In the future, if someone else wants to take a stab at continuing the project, they can fork it. Crucially that moves the project to a different namespace – as it absolutely should, for security reasons.
This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.