This article's headline (and that one it links at the beginning, ugh...) is sort of exemplary of what the biggest problem was.

GIMP's 'Woke' Fork Glimpse is Getting Discontinued

Never once was it advertised as this lmfao. There are tickets as far back as at least a decade that mention changing the name, and the official response of the GIMP maintainers is always "fork it if you want, we're not changing it upstream". So someone finally does that and...well, apparently it's woke or something, what's the big deal, how dare you, etcetera. Clown shit.

I actually spoke to Bobby Moss myself sometime last year about reviving this thru another fork that I would maintain and from what I remember it sounded like people were were very passionate and excited about the original project and were ready to devote time to it. The non-code labor was brought up as an issue, but it seemed to me the far, far bigger problem was the responses to it being totally bonkers hostile for something so innocuous as a forked project...he made very clear that what I would be adopting was years of baggage and that they still got sent harassment and threats about it for ever having existed. I never wound up doing it, but I still think about it sometimes. The whole story is such crap and makes me see red every time I think about it. The free software movement's reputation can be a little unfairly exaggerated from the less-involved crowd for all the important work that's done (imo), and then this shit happens and I remember, "yep, you're all still a bunch of dumbass self-important children all right." Just infuriating.