The GitHub Next team sounds more like a department than a team. It also sounded odd to hear that a group of that size uses and loves something that is unlikely to be used by a large percentage of the team directly. Yay corporate motivational speak! I can use another look at https://despair.com/collections/demotivators after this.

When GitHub Next asked for this, there was already pressure in place for ASF to give that to them, because they're locked into GitHub, so it may not have been given entirely freely. You can say that you're confident it was, but to me it seems impossible to know for sure. I don't know if it was or not. It might be that they would have decided to give it freely but the thought of their relationship with GitHub came to mind while they were considering it. In any case, it's a big ask, because if this takes off, soon the phrase Spark Application that another commenter mentioned will be ambiguous.