The maintenance to be done in this abandoned cabins was minimal, i found. It took not more then 5 or 10 minutes. If you have the time to build for hours, a few minutes maintenance like you had to be done on the previous version of the game would not to much. Do one not clean his house every week ?
I'm not a fan of this either tbh. But especially in rw this is close to impossible to implement, i think.
Because you can build everything, even in small details. We don't have modules. And many tiny elements might not even be visible. How to maintain these? With the blocks you build tiny glasses, decoration, etc. Not only large buildings. A decay of those would be really horrible, in my opinion.
Maybe something else. Like Bandits start to spawn, if you are too long away (only ingame, not offline). Or spiders/rats/etc. First you would need to clean up again.