It's okay to publish code under a free software / open source license without starting a "project". Not every act of sharing code for others to use and/or build on is a "project". Which is something that studies about how many "projects" are "maintained" should keep in mind.
@johns Years ago there was a prominent person in the community who wanted to make these 'project' attributes a requirement for something to be labeled as 'open source'.
I just could not seem to get them to understand these are different (but related) concepts, but their ideas didn't get any traction with the rest of the community either so the problem solved itself.
This person literally told me that if I published my own code in a public repository with a GPLv3 (for example) license, they would not have considered that 'open source' on its own.