The "author" couldn't tell you the why behind any of the original design decisions. It's vibecoded, they never had to know. They would be a terrible teammate with no actual understanding of the project.

You don’t adopt an unofficial fork just because it exists. Showing up with a clone isn’t the same as meeting the standards required to be part of the original project

That might have been a possibility if brought forward in an open and reasonable way, a bit harder to trust someone once they just vibe adopted the project someone was working on for decades and didn't seen an issue with that. Also "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Maybe there are trust issues now? I certainly would refuse to work with someone who comes and steals my brand, pretends I am on board with this and refuses to comply even after being called out.

Nobody else has pointed this out, but a MacOS port of Notepad++ actually goes against some of the branding. Notepad++ very much markets itself as a lightweight and speedy thing that uses the low-level Win32 API directly. It is not just a native application, it is a Windows-native application. Porting it to macOS requires a level of care and expertise which is tantamount to changing the entire organization.

I am sure the Notepad++ team is perfectly fine focusing on Windows expertise and has no interest in bringing in the overhead of another OS. If a serious macOS expert wants to do that, they can fork the project with a different name.

BTW look at the GitHub issues. This is a lazy developer creating a slop project. It would be stupid to bring this incompetent and dishonest person on board.