Two slightly disconnected thoughts:

1. This is why BDFL culture in open source is bad. Because if the BDFL decides to go all in on some completely bizarre mess, all of a sudden there’s massive fork politics.

2. Hey is the marquee product now?? Does anyone actually use Hey? I tried it for a year, and basically found I was paying for the privilege of having a slower, buggier, less feature-rich gmail that can’t even dent the have-a-paid-email-that-doesn’t-exploit-you market (Fastmail and Proton exist, yo).

The only people I know still using Hey are doing so because there's no way to move your address elsewhere. It's a PITA to change your email everywhere (and some unfortunate place don't let you; e.g. email as the login and primary key)