Courageous, but seems to be an immature decision and tactic to me. They haven't even figured out a name for the project and chose to instead signal "death to nim".
Akin to one day, Einstein being known mostly as meaning 'idiot' rather than a physicist.
Look up the history of the word "nice" in England, sometime. But no, it is not just an English-speaking phenomenon, either.
Example: people think rabbits mostly eat carrots because Bugs Bunny likes to snack on them while leaning on something and saying "What's up, Doc?". Except Bugs doing that was a reference to a movie where Clark Gable... ate carrots while leaning on a fence and calling people Doc.
And somehow a parody of a Clark Gable movie turned into most people believing that carrots are a staple of leporine diets.
If that is the case, why is the misconception also widespread in countries where Bugs Bunny wasn't part of the popular culture? E.g. USSR/Russia.
To me it seems like the people who created the fork may literally not have any known means of judging engineering merit aside from how detailed commit messages are.
If it's a large group then detailed commit messages are critical. If it's likely that between 0-1 people are actually going to read the message in the next month and there are a long list of other plans you have to implement with between 0 and 1 people actually helping you, then the value of more detail in commit messages moves toward the limit of 0.