All I know for sure is that the author of Photopea is not AI and I remember when he first released it. No one was calling it a photoshop ripoff. People were calling it an actual open source alternative that functioned and didn't cost the heap of cash Adobe wanted. I recall the response to the announcement being quite positive.
I fully support him and Photopea, but come on. It is clearly in every single way a Photoshop rip-off. There is no denying it by reasonable people.
Can confirm he is not AI and he also used to hang around here. Also before photopea, he tried to make a living once with a open source project, a flash replacement graphic libary for the web, called IvanK.
So that did not work out, but I used it a bit and interacted with him couple of times there, before moving on to easel and later pixi, after it became clear it would not take off and the other ones had more support.
Glad for him to found success with Photopea later, and he definitely has my sympathy here.
But I doubt this will work out much longer in the long run. It is just too easy cloning and improving projects with AI.