But it's a problem for the team, not the user, right? It's one of those things where in closed software it's either... well, the point of the thing, or if it isn't people would get quietly fired and move on trying to impact the perception of the product as little as possible.

Here it impacts the product in that you may have to learn about it, learn about the fork and transition to the fork. There's no separation between the HR/organizational issues and the software issues, and that's a bit of a problem, I think, and why it reads as frequent drama.