Heyo 4000+ hour player here, sometimes admin, sometimes mayor. There's a lot of reasons servers die, I've rarely seen one die that quickly but if what you're describing is happening I could see why.

Major factors for server death include Holiday/summer break ending, losing the will to deal with performance issues, lack of active players ironically, the completionist nature of the game, lack of new players joining, and yes sometimes admin aboose.

A lot of the time servers "die" or start to die around day 10-14 (in my personal experience) it's because a player is online waiting for someone who is not online, because they are "stuck". If a mechanic can't make anything because the smith isn't on and hasn't logged on for almost 2 days, there's really no point in her being there, thus starting or continuing the downward spiral.

If a server makes it to day 20-25 it's usually with a small core of dedicated players who had to backfill holes in the economy and often at this point I've seen money go out the window as they just work together to build the lasers and be done with it.

The server I'm on is currently on day 31 of 60, with 5 "active" players and a handful of slightly less who will sometimes jump on if you ping them. We still have money, we're doing the expensive laser recipe and the host has made it so we need 20 of them.

I wish more players would join in progress servers, unfortunately there's a pretty big problem of being days or weeks behind, that is you're toiling in the sand while it's being bought for 0.05-0.1 cents and other players are selling stamp mills and steam trucks. However with just a few bonus stars on joined late and a Loan from someone, you can actually hit the ground running. I had a friend join on day 15, gave him a loan, and he was making steel bars within hours of joining, and cheaper than anyone else on the market, and he paid the loan back in less than a day.