I think useless is going a bit far, isn't Fire OS a fully maintained fork? I believe there are some maintained forks in China as well but I know less about those
I don't have any Android devices, and I don't follow its forks, derivatives or general state too closely. If you have the money and the means, you can always make a fork of an open source software and make it work for you.
To be more accurate, maybe I can say it won't be very useful for the general public, but big companies can do whatever they want since they have the money and the man-hours.