The article isn’t entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I’d expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.

Well, “maintainer” is usually a single person job. They didn’t write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.
So I mean, it’s not great nobody is stepping up, but it’s also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux’s wifi support single handed, either.
They were doing this all by themselves?!
There’s lots of developers contributing to the wifi drivers, there’s just no “lead maintainer” now
The article isn’t entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I’d expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Btw, you can embedd the image like that:

It will look like that:
Oddly xkcd’s image has no signature or other information identifying the creator.
Post in addition to the link.
Unless you get one of the day’s 10’000, it’ll be recognised by any tech people.
Well, “maintainer” is usually a single person job. They didn’t write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.
So I mean, it’s not great nobody is stepping up, but it’s also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux’s wifi support single handed, either.
That explains many things