I didn’t say it was definitely the end or definitely would end up worse, just that someone who’s followed tech news for a while is unlikely to take this as increasing the odds Bun survives mid-term. If the company was in trouble anyway, sure, maybe, but not if they still had fourish years in the bank.
“Acquired product thriving four years later” isn’t unheard of, but it’s not what you expect. The norm is the product’s dead or stagnant and dying by then.
Is there any historical precedent of someone doing that?
Monty forking MySQL after the Oracle acquisition is the only real example that comes to mind. Oracle being Oracle resulted in OpenOffice getting forked, too, but that was mostly driven by Canonical.