It's only going to get worse. There's a storm coming. The ageing open source engineers who hold up the whole house of cards cannot keep going indefinitely. It's going to turn into tragedy of the commons very quickly.
This is one of many reasons humanity really needs to work on anti-aging and life extension therapies. If we can make these old-timer maintainers biologically immortal, we won't have to worry about this stuff collapsing one day.
I'm not advocating that you do this tedious, thankless, unpaid job for 300 years: apparently, there's already people who actually want to, for whatever unfathomable reason, so I'm advocating that those people be given the means to do so indefinitely.
If you actually read any of this thread you'd see many feasible suggestions for how to fix the problem (better communications methods, improved tooling, adapting to how younger developers engage, etc., etc.). And if you really paid attention, you would notice absolutely none of them start with "first, invent science that doesn't exist...".
