Rambling

1. They are free to ignore it, so not sure how much burden that really is. I agree in principle that "just ignore it" is not zero overhead, but it's very very low overhead.

If you are so burdened that you can't handle this overhead, one option is to add another maintainer.

which leads to:

2. They explicitly offered to maintain it, and help with maintenance in general, which was also refused

These are not randos, either, these are people who have contributed plenty to the kernel, and so this isn't like some random person coming in and offering to help maintain things.