Only the person who uploaded a distribution can schedule it for deletion, and yes, anyone could do this with currently-indexed versions of their modules. Relying foremost on the goodwill of authors rather than the intervention of PAUSE overlords is a feature of CPAN, not a bug.
I'm not sure what you tried with ADOPTME, but transferring first-come permissions to ADOPTME would remove your ability to maintain them and allow anyone to adopt the permissions. Permissions for future uploads are a rather separate concern from the currently indexed latest version of the module that dependency chains rely on. The index does not include distributions on BackPAN, so such distributions are only available via manual intervention.
I'm not sure what you tried with ADOPTME, but transferring first-come permissions to ADOPTME would remove your ability to maintain them and allow anyone to adopt the permissions. Permissions for future uploads are a rather separate concern from the currently indexed latest version of the module that dependency chains rely on. The index does not include distributions on BackPAN, so such distributions are only available via manual intervention.