If it's not maintained by the authors or a designated team but is instead left in the wild, whose to say that whoever picks it up first and launches a mainnet will even honor the original donators and genesis block?
Couldn't they just launch a mainnet with their own genesis and sell the coins again? And it sucks but if they are the first to launch... well, they got there first with free work.
I don't like how this could end up. You have every reason to be pessimistic.
Stealing the code and rebranding it as your own will probably not be taken lightly by the crypto community. There would probably be a backlash and nobody will want to buy such coin.