There's that, but it seems like microsoft has always been a bunch of civil wars between departments, each trying to push theirThing® and their way of doing things.

That's led to nonsense like there being about a dozen different ways to configure the OS (control panel, settings app, local and domain group policies, registry, powershell, msconfig, device manager, disk manager, every single network connection, schedule manager, the services manager, task manager for some reason since 11, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some), most of them specific for certain parts of the OS, or incomplete.

Or the way they publish APIs and UI frameworks and whatnot (also cyclically losing favour and support and being replaced by some shiny new thing that at this point almost no one will use), yet almost every single one of their flagship programs (office, visual studio...) uses its own custom undocumented UI and API hacks, extremely hard to replicate with the available documentation, and forcing the users to learn new UI paradigms with each app or major update...

Hell, a couple weeks ago I was trying to diagnose a remote desktop disconnection issue, and it involved looking at two different logs and trying to relate their events by their timestamps to find the termination code because for some reason remote desktop and winlogon use completely different session IDs, and the remote desktop people never thought to include the winlogon session ID in their logs...

TL;DR, It seems to be mostly different departments trying to push their own things and pushing sticks into each other's wheels, while also, as you said, trying to appease the whims of the current main boss.

Utter chaos.

As long as it remains it's own fork, it shouldn't be an issue. Regardless, the US court already stupidly ruled that any AI generated code is "original"