> There is almost zero friction

Building consensus around which fork to use is going to be a high-friction process; it's going to require much more work than pushing the "fork" button and changing the name in all the assets.

I don't think the consensus is really necessary. Right now we live in a world where version control and patch management is still pretty high cost. That leads to fewer active forks of each open source project.

As the technology improves, I expect us to move to a world where each project is actually a cloud of forks. So instead of rebranding every time there's a fork of XYZ software, we just refer to the forks by the name of the maintainer. e.g. I use Chad McProgrammer's XYZ.

It seems like some people want unity and sameness for its own sake, or to enforce their vision of a project on the users. I just want the software to work as close to my ideal as possible, and am willing to shop around maintainers to find the one that I personally consider the best. Why would you compromise if you don't have to?

Then make something so much better it's worth it to use. This is code, code is purpose driven first and foremost.