Two people communicating one-to-one and starting a new account to solely dedicate to maintaining a pretty public open source project doesn’t sound too fishy, tbh, if everything else checks out. (Catfriend1 confirms the handover, etc.)

Instead of a bare metal hypervisor, you can install Kubernetes on it, k3s works on a single node. Lots of use across the industry.

Yeah exit nodes can be lots of effort(probably, never ran one) but relay nodes do get issues. Some banks do outright block any nodes that run tor, regardless of the exit node or relay node status.