Technically, I think that you can upload something that works now under the same name. It just gets flagged with big, red warnings about "Unofficial Release!" and isn't indexed as well. I can see situations where that would be preferred to picking a new name, at least to some people. I certainly find it preferable to "make a patch available 'somewhere'" that I've seen advocated.

My preference would be to have such unofficial releases become official automatically simply based on the lack of response of the so-called "module owner". Certainly, we should not require presenting evidence of six months of stalking just to contribute a bug fix.