The great thing about useless, unmaintened, and outdated open source projects, is that anyone can pick it up, and turn it into a useful, maintained and updated project.
If it was a closed source project you'd have to start from scratch every time if you wanted to restart the project.
This is quite a bold statement to make. Instead of anyone you should have said someone, particularly someone with a large amount of money, free time and will, in other words very few people. Depending on the size and complexity of the project it could be too much for a single someone to attempt.
It is not unheard of that someone tried and abandoned but would probably have achieved their goal by starting from scratch rather that attempting to revive an outdated unmaintained project.
