Because that transition window (which was planned for O(weeks)) could've been enough time to win back our trust and make us decide to stay on Freenode. I was honestly starting to think maybe we had too much of a knee-jerk reaction with the decision move and was willing to reconsider, but now, well.
Then last week (or the week before) volunteer staff resigned en masse saying that the new owners were planning on taking control of the project’s direction. A number of projects using freenode for chat started looking at alternative just in case.
As GP notes, this looking around was done in the heat of all the resignation, but was not necessarily a done deal for all projects, after all nothing has changed yet.
Today, freenode highjacked / locked hundreds of channels mentioning libera (the alternative network set up by some of the resigning staff) out of nowhere, proving that the network most definitely could not be trusted anymore.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee...
8 hours ago, around 700+ single-hash channels were assigned to a placeholder account, redirected to double-hash "offtopic" channels, and their topics locked. Ops were removed too. The trigger for this seems to have been the string "libera" in their topics.