> In the end, I had to admit that my approach was stalled out and his approach, while different than my own, had forward momentum. I opted to just try to get out of his way and “let him cook”.

I commend that dude for doing that. Too many cool github projects just slowly die in a half-baked state because the author moved on, but also doesn't accept PRs because they're either completely unresponsive or just don't want a different style/approach in "their baby".

So just fork it!

Well that's what everybody does then, with the result that there are now 34 forks with different features, Bugfixes, often to the same couple issues, because of course none of the people tried to talk to each other before hitting the fork button. So you come in and try to fix this by creating another fork and merging as much stuff from the other forks as possible. Now there are 35 forks...