Michael Catanzaro commented on a discussion:
If the maintainer wants to keep the repo open in anticipation of potential future changes, how about we move it to World and remove it from l10n? The main goal here is to avoid wasted translator effort, so removing from l10n seems like the most important step. Archiving is a bit harsh if the maintainer requests otherwise.
We still get to successfully archive a whole bunch of other repos, because most maintainers are not responding.