Sometimes you want to hang things to your wall, and be done with it.

I'd personally do the same. I wouldn't want to be bothered by the future maintainers' choices and get feedback/flak for it. It's a well-known and well-respected way to cycle the name with a "-ng" or "-nx" prefix to signal that this is the newer project with a different set of maintainers.

Being MIT, while is not my favorite license, doesn't give free license to grab and run with things.

Honestly, in my eyes, 3.8K or 38K stars mean nothing, because Open Source is not about you [0], to begin with.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...