With the benefit of hindsight, this sounds more like personal drama than a real fork. I'm not super familiar with 0AD beyond playing sometimes, dunno what their org structure is like or anything, but this doesn't look like there was ever really a threat to 0AD.

Again, benefit of hindsight, but 0AD's releases have always been pretty slow, and it doesn't look like this was really out of the ordinary?

It's hard to have good faith on the part of the forkers when it sounds like they took issue with how closed/"iron fisted" the development of 0AD was, and then ... made a fully private fork with 3 people?

Well, I mean, "personal drama" is likely the chief cause of most forks. So it's not as if this didn't create a real fork (I'm pretty sure the other guys have their own repo).

They do, they even have their own website. Their repo is closed source so we can't take any patch from them though. https://fork-ad.gitlab.io/