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The societal importance or number of users of an OSS project doesn't change maintainers' responsibilities. The responsibility lies, as it always has, with integrators. OSS is "free as in puppy," and when you take a dependency you take the implicit responsibility to maintain it yourself if needed.

What you’re describing is the tragedy of the commons. I remember working on upstream kubernetes at VMware and leadership was all too willing to pass off burden onto other maintainers or companies because ”free as in puppy” and Google, Red Hat, or some other corp owned that part of the stack

At some point, an important open and free project stops being “just a project” and becomes a public good needing the same care and planning as other widely used/distributed utilities: we’ve yet to expand the open source model to encompass that.

as a maintainer I absolutely disagree. that is just one view, and it results in a type of society I don't even particularly want to exist in if you don't want to have that responsibility, don't release software