I wonder if many folks who only joined the world of software development after DVCSs (and indeed, just VCSs) became popularized can understand why Fetchmail was not trivial to fork and fix.

The only time I ever interacted with ESR on fetchmail, I reported a bug for an issue I ran into (with Kerberos 4 IMAP), submitted a patch, and it was accepted without discussion in the next release.

Admittedly, this was 19 years ago, and it was a relatively small fix.

I've been using fetchmail every two minutes (daemon mode) for well over two decades and not once has it failed to do what it needs to do. So it's a bit of a stretch to call it garbage. Other than emacs and mutt, there's no other tool with such stable longevity in my toolbox.

Under ESR, fetchmail was garbage. However, a new team took over development in the early 2000s after ESR abandoned the program. Many parts have been re-written to address design criticisms.