You can really just stop. If you leave it to languish and the community wants to continue, it will be forked. Nature of the beast. And nobody can fault you for that as long as you tell the community, “I’m out”.

I’m not saying that is the best method, but for anybody out there feeling a ton of pressure to the point it affects your wellbeing, you can stop.

Tell the users about your intentions to step down. If you don't have a plan for succession, see if they come up with something or if someone steps up.

Remember there are worse outcomes than just abandoning the project. Officially handing it over to a malicious or incompetent maintainer would be worse. If someone really wants to take it over, they don't need your permission. Announcing your departure is already more than a lot of projects do.

hey, can we see the project? I'm curious.

I probably won't be the new maintainer, but I might add it to the list of open source projects I'd like to contribute.

I have gifted several repos to the community writ large... Transferring to a stranger is dangerous. Shutting it down is letting the community disolve into the broader ocean of OSS. If you care deeply about this project (AND are not burned out, this is key) I would highly recommend transparency first. Edit your main readme or make a post on your issues/forum/etc, whatever is the most popular, asking for community leaders to step up in taking the reigns. Promote one to many (depending on how popular this repo is) contributers to become stewards, where they are essentially granted all permissions except a rolling a new version, retain that power for yourself and over a year or so you approve releases but take no active part in development. Once one to many contributers assume the ownership role (in spirit only as you hold the release keys) and are actively progressing what used to be your baby, then and only then do you pick the best of the worst (lol sorry RLM is always in the back of my mind) to be your true successor - handing over the last of your exclusive permissions and breaking a bottle of champage on the figurative new ship.

I wish you the best and I thank you deeply from my heart for contributing your labor and love to the OSS community.

If you're open to it, I've seen maintainers go to "maintenance mode".

Write it high in the readme so people see it, and write what it means: basically that you're not accepting PRs, you're not developing new features, but you will do bug fixes and basic maintenance (dependency updates, etc).

What language? What does it do?

I'm no fan of GitHub but if you set up dependabot (or equivalent elsewhere), you can ramp maintaince down to running PRs through tests every few months (assuming it's not software with a large attack surface)

If you have a contributor you trust, transfer control to them. If not, last one out gets the lights.