The idea of open source protocols is that anyone can start freely building on it without anyones permission. 

If there are none left willing to continue Damus development, then another iOS client will appear with another dev coding it.

It's hard to shutdown decentralized development, you have to chase every developer distributed across different countries/jurisdictions. 

Until people find Nostr useful, it will be very hard, almost impossible, to shutdown the network.  

 you're telling me things I already know. 
Re-read what will shared and read what I said. It's not hard to understand.