A comment from 2021:

> Unfortunately, because the code that chardet was originally based on was LGPL, we don't really have a way to relicense it. Believe me, if we could, I would. There was talk of chardet being added to the standard library, and that was deemed impossible because of being unable to change the license.

So the person that did the rewrite knew this was a dive into dangerous water. That's so disrespectful.

Or more like he did the right thing to maximise the utility of the project ;) It's basically "a bunch of people's feelings" vs. it being more widely used, improving the ecosystem, and so on.