I think youtube-dl had a situation like that, now yt-dlp. (except I don't know if the original dev's status is confirmed?)
also exa, now forked to eza. My impression is for this case, the original dev is OK.
But honestly I have encountered lots of software packages which have been dropped and picked up in this way. Man pages can contain history like this, occasionally going back to the 80s or even 70s for the basics. The main problem is that the original software package is so well known and sometimes it's hard to find out about the newer iterations so they have a difficult time picking up steam. I used to have a bookmarklet that would show forks on github sorted by activity; occasionally this allowed finding the more recently-developed project. But more likely you have to wait to stumble on it in a forum.