Well, assuming that iNat continues in some form or another, every one of us will go inactive for one reason or another - life happens, life doesn’t happen, etc. That would mean that in time, every one of the 17M (!) records currently on the site will lose their “owners.” This creates the potential of having a “standing wave” of valid accessible observations instead of one that constantly grows and accumulates over time.
This is one of the reasons I think that we should strongly consider changing the policy to be that, when someone posts an observation to iNat, they are donating it to the public good. This would be part of the social contract of participating in this community. For as long as they are current, active, contactable contributors they retain control of their observations to the degree that they can change them, turn off community ID (if they really want to), even delete them individually, but once they go awol, then control passes to the iNat community. Similarly, participants can choose to delete individual IDs and comments they made, but not do so for all their contributions en masse. If/when they choose to leave, the IDs could be anonymized, but not deleted. If this is not acceptable to a potential contributor, they have the option of choosing not to participate.
Nothing new here, but (I think) worth reiterating occasionally when these topics resurface :-)