They must have abandoned such plans (if they had any) when they got some backlash after they added telemetry features and half a dozen forks popped up overnight.

They haven't

Just go the main homepage and there is a banner which leads you to buy the latest plugin

https://www.audacityteam.org/

But hontestly nothing wrong with that imo

> half a dozen forks popped up overnight

There is only one actively maintained fork https://tenacityaudio.org/