I'm not very cognizant of the exact circumstances, and level of "direness" that FA is currently in, either, though I suspect that serving their own static copy of the archive would be well within their current resources, if that was all they wanted to do. (And I'm fairly sure that if FA had died as a community, I would have heard about it - at least from what I've read, I think the direness is solely the result of suddenly needing more operating capital, not a change in usership. Certainly they seem to have enough active users to think they can get the Pepsi votes they need mostly from their own users.)

But, yeah, the FA leadership communicates badly to people who aren't part of FA, often mismanages the FA community itself, it always has, and the long history of many of them being viscerally hated by large sections of fandom (sometimes with justification, even) doesn't help from either direction.