We have had to restart the project from scratch due to the original Node-RED Dashboard's (I'll call this Dashboard 1.0) Angular 1 dependency. We couldn't fork.
That being said, because of how widely adopted and popular Dashboard 1.0 is, we wanted to make sure we mimicked that user experience as much as possible, so that users familiar with 1.0 felt comfortable with 2.0, but still ensured we made improvements in areas, where appropriate. Hence, there is a lot of crossover with the same, familiar nodes (plus a fair few more).
FlowFuse are actively developing and supporting Dashboard 2.0, and it's here to stay. It can be considered the "official" next phase of Dashboard 1.0. Nick, the co-creator of Node-RED, is FlowFuse's CTO, and FlowFuse ourselves are contributing heavily to the Node-RED project.
I wrote this up today: https://flowfuse.com/blog/2024/06/dashboard-1-deprecated/#wh... which gives a summary of the key differences, what we have planned, and how to get started.