The article says this all started in "early 2020"; about a year and a half ago. Indeed, looking at the new-session-manager commit history, the fork was started in April 2020[1], and first announced in June 2020[2].

> It appears that Fedora dumped this guy's version in favor of the fork some time back

So did Arch Linux. Notably, the Arch Linux contributor who did it is David Runge, one of the 3 people called out in the article.

[1]: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager/commit/6352... (the first commit after the last commit from Jonathan Moore Liles)

[2]: https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2020-... (1.3 is the initial version of the fork, as at the time 1.2.0 was the latest version of non-session-manager)