Comment by dspillett

Even with AI, the result needs to be reviewed both to make sure it is actually correct in what it intends to do and that it does not have knock-on effects anywhere else. Given the description of the bug I'd think that spinning up the AI and pointing it in the right direction would save no time over just fixing the issue completely by hand.

Fixing the issue could set an expectation in current users of the package that it might get updates going forward, which it obviously won't from this maintainer, potentially reducing any impetus that might exist to move over to something that is a more correct solution these days. Handing over control of the project where it is has risks which are stated in TFA.

So while both fixing and deprecating could have been done, I think the right choice (just mark it as deprecated) has been made. Not fixing the existing bug(s) will not break anything that is using the package any more than it is already broken. If one of the existing issues had potential to be a security issue then I might err more towards fix+deprecate (with big red text included in any announcement of the fix to the effect that this is the last one and future issues won't get resolved upstream).