Isn’t that true in general, though? I normally get notified about CPython issues relating to me via emails from GitHub as well as the CPython issue tracker. If email breaks (for whatever reason) then (depending on where the breakage is) no-one might find out unless they visit a repo regularly.
They can, as far as I know. It was a PyPA maintainer who accidentally deleted the repository, so they have write access to it, as far as I know.
I periodically groom the issue list of projects I maintain so not necessarily 
Maybe it’s a separate list, I personally only have read-only rights to it, and not sure there’s any active maintainer on it other than you.
I do when I have time, but there isn’t always the time to be proactive in this manner, especially for projects which don’t see lots of issues posted.
It’s certainly not because of anything I’ve done, AFAIK - any PyPA administrator should be able to give people access rights. But raising issues and PRs should normally be sufficient - I will have no problems asking for help if the need arises.
I’m +1 on experimental features. Packaging is not suffering from too much innovation.