I don't see the motivation they had to build this other than they wanted support for YANG right? I'd want to see their motivation behind taking on such a big project
The end goal is to have something that has its governance managed by a fondation and that multiple entities can contribute to.
So don't think of it as typefox taking this on their own they're not alone and more contributors will get involved.
The IDE in Eclipse Che can only run in browsers and in the context of a Che workspace server but not standalone as a desktop app. Our customers need a solution that can be hosted from containers, similarly to Che but also run as standard desktop apps, similar to the traditional Eclipse IDE. So Theia aims at both desktop applications as well as cloud applications.
That said, to me the sweet spot of Eclipse Che is not its IDE, but the workspace management. We are in close collaboration with Eclipse Che developers to make sure that Theia can be used within Che. "